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Certifiable Safe RLHF: Fixed-Penalty Constraint Optimization for Safer Language Models

Authors: Kartik Pandit, Sourav Ganguly, Arnesh Banerjee, Shaahin Angizi, Arnob Ghosh

Published: 2025-10-03

arXiv ID: 2510.03520v1

Added to Library: 2025-10-07 04:02 UTC

📄 Abstract

Ensuring safety is a foundational requirement for large language models (LLMs). Achieving an appropriate balance between enhancing the utility of model outputs and mitigating their potential for harm is a complex and persistent challenge. Contemporary approaches frequently formalize this problem within the framework of Constrained Markov Decision Processes (CMDPs) and employ established CMDP optimization techniques. However, these methods exhibit two notable limitations. First, their reliance on reward and cost functions renders performance highly sensitive to the underlying scoring mechanism, which must capture semantic meaning rather than being triggered by superficial keywords. Second, CMDP-based training entails tuning dual-variable, a process that is both computationally expensive and does not provide any provable safety guarantee for a fixed dual variable that can be exploitable through adversarial jailbreaks. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Certifiable Safe-RLHF (CS-RLHF) that introduces a cost model trained on a large-scale corpus to assign semantically grounded safety scores. In contrast to the lagrangian-based approach, CS-RLHF adopts a rectified penalty-based formulation. This design draws on the theory of exact penalty functions in constrained optimization, wherein constraint satisfaction is enforced directly through a suitably chosen penalty term. With an appropriately scaled penalty, feasibility of the safety constraints can be guaranteed at the optimizer, eliminating the need for dual-variable updates. Empirical evaluation demonstrates that CS-RLHF outperforms state-of-the-art LLM model responses rendering at-least 5 times efficient against nominal and jail-breaking prompts

🔍 Key Points

  • Identification of 'Consequence-blindness' as a systematic failure mode in large language models (LLMs), leading to vulnerabilities in safety alignment.
  • Development and introduction of the CB-Bench benchmark for evaluating models based on their ability to separate semantic risk from outcome risk, showing that current models generally fail at this task.
  • Introduction of the CS-Chain-4k dataset, specifically designed for consequence-aware training, leading to improved performance in models with reduced rates of harmful outputs and over-refusals on benign queries.
  • Demonstration through experiments that fine-tuning with CS-Chain-4k enables models to achieve a better balance between safety and utility, showcasing its practical impact.
  • Findings suggest that advanced reasoning capabilities may exacerbate models' reliance on superficial semantic cues, thereby worsening safety alignment issues.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper presents critical insights into the challenges facing the safety alignment of Large Language Models, particularly illustrating the concept of 'Consequence-blindness' affecting current methodologies. By providing novel benchmarks and training datasets designed to address these issues, the authors lay foundational work for enhancing AI safety and decision-making processes. The implications are significant not only for the development of LLMs but for the broader AI community focused on security and responsible use.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

This paper is essential for AI security researchers as it addresses prevalent vulnerabilities in LLMs that can be exploited for harmful purposes. The identification of consequence-blindness introduces a novel perspective on safety alignments, prompting exploration of better training strategies and models. By advancing benchmarks and presenting practical datasets, this research enhances the understanding of how LLMs can be fortified against misuse, an increasingly relevant area of study given the rapid proliferation of these technologies.

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