Safety Offset Learning: When Benign Fine-Tuning Misaligns LLMs

Overview & Synopsis

Safety risks from fine-tuning are commonly characterized by the harmfulness of the training data:harmful fine-tuning is considered dangerous, while benign fine-tuning is often assumed to preservealignment. We argue that this view misses a more fundamental factor-the behavioral transition inducedby supervision. Harmful fine-tuning and safety-degrading benign fine-tuning can both be understoodas learning the same refusal-to-compliance transition, but on different data distributions. We studywhether such a transition learned on benign inputs can generalize to harmful requests. We constructbenign examples that an aligned model initially tends to refuse and pair them with their originalharmless responses, creating a discrepancy between the model's initial refusal and the supervisedanswer. Fine-tuning on these examples increases harmful compliance, but only when two conditionshold together: the discrepancy is large enough, and it cannot be resolved through a narrow surface-levelshortcut. With the induced discrepancy matched, varying only whether it is localized changes harmfulcompliance by an order of magnitude; raising the discrepancy does not help while a shortcut remainsavailable, and removing the shortcut does not help while the discrepancy is small. Building on thisobservation, we introduce SAFEOFF, a dataset of benign instructions rewritten to raise the alignedmodel's refusal likelihood and paired with their original answers. Across three aligned LLMs and threesafety benchmarks, SAFEOFF substantially weakens safety alignment despite containing no explicitharmful supervision, suggesting that fine-tuning safety depends not only on what data a model sees, butalso on which behavioral boundary the supervision moves.