UpSafe$^\circ$C: Upcycling for Controllable Safety in Large Language Models

arXiv:2510.02194v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks, but remain vulnerable to safety risks such as harmful content generation and jailbreak attacks. Existing safety techniques---including external guardrails, inference-time guidance, and post-training alignment---each face limitations in balancing safety, utility, and controllability. In this work, we propose UpSafe$^\circ$C, a unified framework for enhancing LLM safety through safety-aware upcycling. Our approach first identifies safety-critical layers and upcycles them into a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure, where the router acts as a soft guardrail that selectively activates original MLPs and added safety experts. We further introduce a two-stage SFT strategy to strengthen safety discrimination while preserving general capabilities. To enable flexible control at inference time, we introduce a safety temperature mechanism, allowing dynamic adjustment of the trade-off between safety and utility. Experiments across multiple benchmarks, base model, and model scales demonstrate that UpSafe$^\circ$C achieves robust safety improvements against harmful and jailbreak inputs, while maintaining competitive performance on general tasks. Moreover, analysis shows that safety temperature provides fine-grained inference-time control that achieves controllable trade-off between utility and safety. Our results highlight a new direction for LLM safety: moving from static alignment toward dynamic, modular, and inference-aware control. Code: https://github.com/HansSunY/UpSafe.

Abstract:Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress across a wide range of tasks, but remain vulnerable to safety risks such as harmful content generation and jailbreak attacks. Existing safety techniques---including external guardrails, inference-time guidance, and post-training alignment---each face limitations in balancing safety, utility, and controllability. In this work, we propose UpSafe$^\circ$C, a unified framework for enhancing LLM safety through safety-aware upcycling. Our approach first identifies safety-critical layers and upcycles them into a sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) structure, where the router acts as a soft guardrail that selectively activates original MLPs and added safety experts. We further introduce a two-stage SFT strategy to strengthen safety discrimination while preserving general capabilities. To enable flexible control at inference time, we introduce a safety temperature mechanism, allowing dynamic adjustment of the trade-off between safety and utility. Experiments across multiple benchmarks, base model, and model scales demonstrate that UpSafe$^\circ$C achieves robust safety improvements against harmful and jailbreak inputs, while maintaining competitive performance on general tasks. Moreover, analysis shows that safety temperature provides fine-grained inference-time control that achieves controllable trade-off between utility and safety. Our results highlight a new direction for LLM safety: moving from static alignment toward dynamic, modular, and inference-aware control. Code: this https URL.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2510.02194 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2510.02194v2 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.02194 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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UpSafe$^\circ$C: Upcycling for Controllable Safety in Large Language Models

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