Layer-Aware Representation Filtering: Purifying Finetuning Data to Preserve LLM Safety Alignment

Abstract: With rapid advancement and increasing accessibility of LLMs, fine-tuning aligned models has become a critical step for adapting them to real-world applications, which makes the safety of this fine-tuning process more important than ever. However, recent studies have highlighted a critical challenge: even when fine-tuning with seemingly benign downstream datasets, the safety of aligned LLMs can be compromised, making them more susceptible to malicious instructions. In this paper, we show that fine-tuning datasets often contain samples with safety-degrading features that are not easily identifiable on the surface. These samples can significantly degrade the safety alignment of LLMs during fine-tuning. To address this issue, we propose LARF, a \textbf{L}ayer-\textbf{A}ware \textbf{R}epresentation \textbf{F}iltering method. This method identifies safety-sensitive layers within the LLM and leverages their representations to detect which data samples in the post-training dataset contain safety-degrading features. Experimental results demonstrate that LARF can effectively identify benign data with safety-degrading features. After removing such data, the safety alignment degradation caused by fine-tuning is mitigated. Please see our code at \href{https://github.com/LLLeoLi/LARF}{https://github.com/LLLeoLi/LARF}.