用特殊标记保留危险知识,实现精准安全控制。
Mark, Don't Erase: Token Inoculation for Dual-Use Knowledge in LLMs

- 通过特殊标记绑定危险内容,实现可控访问
- 危险域准确率从79%降至18%,良性任务保留93%性能
- 适合需要高安全与高可用平衡的AI系统
针对双用途知识的安全干预通常在销毁(如去学习、过滤)与输出层抑制(如拒绝训练)之间二选一,均导致邻域能力下降或过度拒绝。本文提出条件化而非削减的思路:危险知识可保留在模型中,通过特权控制标记进行行为管控。提出的Token Inoculation方法分两步:预训练阶段,在双用途文档旁插入特殊标记,使模型将标记与危险语义绑定;微调阶段,教会模型在标记存在时正确回答危险问题,不存在时拒绝,实现选择性拒绝。在危险领域(如WMDP-Bio)上,准确率从79%降至18%,同时在良性领域(如MMLU)保持93%的基线性能,优于1B-14B规模下的去学习与拒绝微调基线。进一步证明拒绝选择性可通过条件信号质量调控,且预训练中的领域特异性语义绑定对泛化至关重要。结果表明,安全对齐应视为条件化问题,受控访问比删除知识更精确。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Safety interventions on dual-use knowledge typically choose between destroying hazardous content (e.g., unlearning, filtering) and suppressing it at the output layer (e.g., refusal training); both pay a tax in adjacent-domain competence or over-refusal. We argue that the right operation is conditioning, not reduction: we show that hazardous knowledge can be retained in the model and behaviorally gated by a privileged control token. Our method, Token Inoculation, introduces a binding-and-branching approach. First, during continued pre-training, we mark hazardous content by inserting a special token alongside dual-use documents, so the model binds the marker to the underlying semantics of the hazardous domain. Second, during supervised fine-tuning, we teach the model to answer hazardous queries correctly when the special token is present and to refuse them when it is absent, thereby enabling selective refusal without removing dual-use knowledge. On hazardous domain (e.g., WMDP-Bio), Token Inoculation reduces accuracy from 79% to 18% while retaining 93% of the base-model's benign-domain performance (e.g., MMLU), achieving the best safety-utility trade-off against unlearning and refusal-tuning baselines across 1B-14B model scales. We further show that refusal selectivity is controllable through the quality of the conditioning signal and that domain-specific semantic binding during pre-training is critical for the conditional behavior to generalize beyond memorized triggers. Our results suggest that safety alignment is better cast as a conditioning problem than a forgetting one: behavioral control is more precise when sensitive knowledge is retained under controlled access than when it is destroyed.
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