Papers by Syed Zawad
SafeMERGE: Preserving Safety Alignment in Fine-Tuned Large Language Models via Selective Layer-Wise Model Merging (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that fine-tuning can erode safety alignment, causing LLMs to respond to harmful or unethical prompts. |
| Approach: | They propose a lightweight framework that restores safety while maintaining downstream performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces harmful outputs compared to other defenses, with negligible impact on utility. |