Paper Detail

CSULoRA: Closest Safe Update Low-Rank Adaptation

Oleksandr Marchenko Breneur, Adelaide Danilov, Aria Nourbakhsh, Salima Lamsiyah

arxiv Score 5.8

Published 2026-05-28 · First seen 2026-06-01

General AI

Abstract

Low-rank adaptation has become a standard method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models, but even small amounts of unsafe or adversarial fine-tuning data can substantially weaken the safety behavior of aligned models. Existing safety-preserving LoRA methods often rely on hard interventions such as projection, pruning, thresholding, or additional training objectives. While these methods can suppress unsafe update directions, they may also remove task-relevant information or require extra tuning. We introduce CSULoRA, a post-hoc method for correcting trained LoRA adapters through closest safe update estimation. CSULoRA estimates a safety-aligned subspace from the weight displacement between a safety-aligned model and its corresponding base checkpoint. It then decomposes each LoRA update into fully aligned, partially aligned, and off-subspace components. Instead of discarding components outside the estimated safety subspace, CSULoRA solves a closed-form penalized minimum-change problem that preserves the fully aligned component while smoothly attenuating potentially unsafe directions according to their relative energy. In adversarial fine-tuning experiments, CSULoRA substantially reduces attack success rate while preserving most of the utility gains obtained from standard LoRA fine-tuning.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
later
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{breneur2026csulora,
  title = {CSULoRA: Closest Safe Update Low-Rank Adaptation},
  author = {Oleksandr Marchenko Breneur and Adelaide Danilov and Aria Nourbakhsh and Salima Lamsiyah},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Low-rank adaptation has become a standard method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large language models, but even small amounts of unsafe or adversarial fine-tuning data can substantially weaken the safety behavior of aligned models. Existing safety-preserving LoRA methods often rely on hard interventions such as projection, pruning, thresholding, or additional training objectives. While these methods can suppress unsafe update directions, they may also remove task-relevant information or },
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.30640},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.CL},
  eprint = {2605.30640},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}