arXiv:2606.02530cs.AIcs.CL2026-06

用少量有害样本实现高效安全对齐,避免模型能力下降。

SafeSteer: Localized On-Policy Distillation for Efficient Safety Alignment

论文配图:SafeSteer: Localized On-Policy Distillation for Efficient Safety Alignment
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 仅对安全相关词元进行局部策略蒸馏,保留通用能力。
  • 仅需100条有害样本,比基线少用99%数据。
  • 适合追求低成本高安全性的实际部署场景。

大型语言模型(LLMs)对齐人类价值观常导致通用能力下降,称为对齐代价。现有方法依赖大量通用数据或辅助奖励模型来平衡目标。本文认为,因安全特征在输出分布中本就稀疏,对齐应聚焦局部修改而非全局权衡。为此,提出SafeSteer:通过激活引导构建安全教师,设计安全词元选择算法,并在训练中仅对这些词元施加反KL惩罚,以保护通用能力。实验表明,该方法在七项安全基准上表现优异,仅在五项通用能力基准上造成轻微退化。关键优势在于仅需100条有害样本,无需任何通用数据,不足此前基线的1%,显著降低对齐成本。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values often degrades their general capabilities, termed the alignment tax. Existing methods mitigate this by balancing dual objectives, which heavily rely on massive general-purpose data or auxiliary reward models. In this paper, we argue that, because safety features are inherently sparse within the output distribution, alignment requires localized modifications rather than global trade-offs. To this end, we propose SafeSteer, which performs on-policy distillation confined to safety tokens. First, we construct a safety teacher via activation steering. Based on this teacher, we develop a safety token selection algorithm. Consequently, SafeSteer restricts the reverse KL penalty to these tokens during training to preserve general capabilities. Experimental results across diverse models show that our SafeSteer achieves a superior trade-off between safety and general capability compared with existing methods, attaining strong safety performance on seven safety benchmarks with only minimal degradation on five general capability benchmarks. Notably, SafeSteer requires only 100 harmful samples without using any general-purpose data, less than 1% of what previous baselines used, considerably reducing alignment cost. More details are on our project page at https://anjingkun.github.io/SafeSteer.

安全对齐高效训练小样本

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