Tiansheng Huang
2026
H3Fusion: Helpful, Harmless, Honest Fusion of Aligned LLMs
Selim Furkan Tekin | Fatih Ilhan | Sihao Hu | Tiansheng Huang | Yichang Xu | Zachary Yahn | Ling Liu
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Selim Furkan Tekin | Fatih Ilhan | Sihao Hu | Tiansheng Huang | Yichang Xu | Zachary Yahn | Ling Liu
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
The alignment of pre-trained LLMs continues to draw significant attention from both industry and academia, aiming to ensure responses that are helpful, harmless, and honest. However, identifying a point in the model’s representation subspace that simultaneously satisfies all these properties remains challenging. H3Fusion addresses this challenge by introducing a mixture-of-experts (MoE)-based fusion mechanism that models alignment as a controllable drift within the subspace, guided by a drift-regularization loss to balance competing alignment dimensions. Furthermore, we formulate the alignment by finding a dual objective of harnessing the distance of generated embeddings and alignment embeddings, and introduce gating loss by canalizing the activations on the contributing experts. Extensive evaluations of three benchmark datasets show that H3Fusion is more helpful, less harmful, and more honest in three aspects: it outperforms each individually aligned model by 11.37%, and provides stronger robustness compared to the state-of-the-art LLM ensemble approaches by 13.77% and model-merging approaches by 6.18 %. Code is available at https://github.com/git-disl/h3fusion.
CTRAP: Embedding Collapse Trap to Safeguard Large Language Models from Harmful Fine-Tuning
Biao Yi | Tiansheng Huang | Baolei Zhang | Tong Li | Lihai Nie | Zheli Liu | Li Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Biao Yi | Tiansheng Huang | Baolei Zhang | Tong Li | Lihai Nie | Zheli Liu | Li Shen
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Fine-tuning-as-a-service, while commercially successful for Large Language Model (LLM) providers, exposes models to harmful fine-tuning attacks. As a widely explored defense paradigm against such attacks, unlearning attempts to remove malicious knowledge from LLMs, thereby essentially preventing them from being used to perform malicious tasks. However, we highlight a critical flaw: the inherent general adaptability of LLMs allows them to easily bypass selective unlearning by rapidly relearning or repurposing their general capabilities for harmful tasks. To address this fundamental limitation, we propose a paradigm shift: instead of selective removal, we advocate for inducing model collapse, effectively forcing the model to ”unlearn everything”, specifically in response to updates characteristic of malicious adaptation. This collapse directly neutralizes the very general capabilities that attackers exploit, tackling the core issue unaddressed by selective unlearning. We introduce the Collapse Trap (CTRAP) as a practical mechanism to implement this concept conditionally. Embedded during alignment, CTRAP pre-configures the model’s reaction to subsequent fine-tuning dynamics. If updates during fine-tuning constitute a persistent attempt to reverse safety alignment, the pre-configured trap triggers a progressive degradation of the model’s core language modeling abilities, ultimately rendering it inert and useless for the attacker. Crucially, this collapse mechanism remains dormant during benign fine-tuning, ensuring the model’s utility and general capabilities are preserved.