# Safe to Serve: Aligning Instruction-Tuned Models for Safety and Helpfulness

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.00074 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00074/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 22 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Nov 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [Safety alignment and jailbreak attacks](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/safety-alignment-and-jailbreak-attacks/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 22 of 22)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [PIQA: Reasoning about Physical Commonsense in Natural Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11641/) (2019)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [BoolQ: Exploring the Surprising Difficulty of Natural Yes/No Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.10044/) (2019)
- [Llama Guard: LLM-based Input-Output Safeguard for Human-AI Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.06674/) (2023)
- [Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03693/) (2023)
- [BeaverTails: Towards Improved Safety Alignment of LLM via a Human-Preference Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04657/) (2023)
- [Red Teaming Language Models to Reduce Harms: Methods, Scaling Behaviors, and Lessons Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07858/) (2022)
- [RAFT: Reward rAnked FineTuning for Generative Foundation Model Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06767/) (2023)
- [Enabling Large Language Models to Generate Text with Citations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14627/) (2023)
- [RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13787/) (2024)
- [CodeBLEU: a Method for Automatic Evaluation of Code Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.10297/) (2020)
- [Safety-Tuned LLaMAs: Lessons From Improving the Safety of Large Language Models that Follow Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07875/) (2023)
- [Mitigating the Alignment Tax of RLHF](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06256/) (2023)
- [MART: Improving LLM Safety with Multi-round Automatic Red-Teaming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07689/) (2023)
- [HelpSteer: Multi-attribute Helpfulness Dataset for SteerLM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09528/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Common Sense vs. Morality: The Curious Case of Narrative Focus Bias in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09434/) (2026)
- [Localizing Safety Alignment: MLP Layers and Mid-Network Blocks Encode Refusal Behavior in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11583/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning and text generation. However, these models can inadvertently generate unsafe or biased responses when prompted with problematic inputs, raising significant ethical and practical concerns for real-world deployment. This research addresses the critical challenge of developing language models that generate both helpful and harmless content, navigating the delicate balance between model performance and safety. We demonstrate that incorporating safety-related instructions during the instruction-tuning of pre-trained models significantly reduces toxic responses to unsafe prompts without compromising performance on helpfulness datasets. We found Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to be particularly effective, outperforming both SIT and RAFT by leveraging both chosen and rejected responses for learning. Our approach increased safe responses from 40% to over 90% across various harmfulness benchmarks. In addition, we discuss a rigorous evaluation framework encompassing specialized metrics and diverse datasets for safety and helpfulness tasks ensuring a comprehensive assessment of the model's capabilities.