Self-Guided Defense: Adaptive Safety Alignment for Reasoning Models via Synthesized Guidelines

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Wang, Yuhang, Zhu, Yanxu, Lu, Dongyuan, Sang, Jitao
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866917184259751936
author Wang, Yuhang
Zhu, Yanxu
Lu, Dongyuan
Sang, Jitao
author_facet Wang, Yuhang
Zhu, Yanxu
Lu, Dongyuan
Sang, Jitao
contents Reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, ensuring their safety against adversarial jailbreak prompts remains a critical challenge. Due to the covert and deceptive nature of such prompts, they can often evade built-in safety mechanisms and lead to the generation of harmful content. This underscores the need for an adaptive safety alignment approach that enables models to autonomously reinforce their defenses in response to adversarial inputs. This paper introduces the Synthesized Guideline-based Adaptive Safety Alignment (SGASA) framework, which internalizes model-generated safety guidelines to strengthen models' ability to enhance robustness against harmful adversarial prompts while minimizing unnecessary refusals of benign requests. SGASA consists of two key stages: Data Pre-synthesis, which generates safety guidelines and augmented prompts; and Alignment Fine-tuning, which leverages Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to embed these guidelines into the model. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that SGASA significantly improves model safety, validating its adaptive and scalable effectiveness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_21214
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Self-Guided Defense: Adaptive Safety Alignment for Reasoning Models via Synthesized Guidelines
Wang, Yuhang
Zhu, Yanxu
Lu, Dongyuan
Sang, Jitao
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Reasoning models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, ensuring their safety against adversarial jailbreak prompts remains a critical challenge. Due to the covert and deceptive nature of such prompts, they can often evade built-in safety mechanisms and lead to the generation of harmful content. This underscores the need for an adaptive safety alignment approach that enables models to autonomously reinforce their defenses in response to adversarial inputs. This paper introduces the Synthesized Guideline-based Adaptive Safety Alignment (SGASA) framework, which internalizes model-generated safety guidelines to strengthen models' ability to enhance robustness against harmful adversarial prompts while minimizing unnecessary refusals of benign requests. SGASA consists of two key stages: Data Pre-synthesis, which generates safety guidelines and augmented prompts; and Alignment Fine-tuning, which leverages Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) and Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to embed these guidelines into the model. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets demonstrate that SGASA significantly improves model safety, validating its adaptive and scalable effectiveness.
title Self-Guided Defense: Adaptive Safety Alignment for Reasoning Models via Synthesized Guidelines
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.21214