微调会破坏视觉语言模型的安全对齐,且危害行为具有广泛泛化性。
Narrow Fine-Tuning Erodes Safety Alignment in Vision-Language Agents
- 在有害数据上微调模型,即使少量也会引发严重安全偏差。
- 高秩LoRA微调使多模态误对齐达70.71,远超文本评估的41.19。
- 危害行为集中在低维子空间,可被少数主成分捕获,适合安全研究者关注。
持续学习的多模态智能体需通过后训练不断适应新任务,但这一过程在能力获取与安全对齐间产生根本矛盾。本文表明,在窄域有害数据上微调已对齐的视觉语言模型,会引发严重的、跨任务与跨模态的普遍性误对齐。基于Gemma3-4B的实验显示,误对齐程度随LoRA秩单调上升,多模态评估下的误对齐高达70.71±1.22(r=128),显著高于文本评估的41.19±2.51,表明单模态安全基准可能低估了视觉语言模型的对齐退化。关键发现:仅10%的有害数据即引发显著对齐偏差。几何分析揭示,有害行为占据极低维子空间,多数误对齐信息由前10个主成分捕获。为缓解该问题,我们测试了良性微调和激活引导策略,虽能显著降低误对齐,但无法完全消除已有有害行为。研究强调亟需更鲁棒的持续学习框架,现有后训练范式难以保障部署后的对齐性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Lifelong multimodal agents must continuously adapt to new tasks through post-training, but this creates a fundamental tension between acquiring capabilities and preserving safety alignment. We demonstrate that fine-tuning aligned vision-language models on narrow-domain harmful datasets induces severe emergent misalignment that generalizes broadly across unrelated tasks and modalities. Through experiments on Gemma3-4B, we show that misalignment scales monotonically with LoRA rank, and that multimodal evaluation reveals substantially higher misalignment ($70.71 \pm 1.22$ at $r=128$) than text-only evaluation ($41.19 \pm 2.51$), suggesting that unimodal safety benchmarks may underestimate alignment degradation in vision-language models. Critically, even 10\% harmful data in the training mixture induces substantial alignment degradation. Geometric analysis reveals that harmful behaviors occupy a remarkably low-dimensional subspace, with the majority of misalignment information captured in 10 principal components. To mitigate misalignment, we evaluate two strategies: benign narrow fine-tuning and activation-based steering. While both approaches substantially reduce misalignment, neither completely removes the learned harmful behaviors. Our findings highlight the need for robust continual learning frameworks, as current post-training paradigms may not sufficiently preserve alignment in post-deployment settings.
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