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Optimus: A Robust Defense Framework for Mitigating Toxicity while Fine-Tuning Conversational AI

Aravind Cheruvu, Shravya Kanchi, Sifat Muhammad Abdullah, Nicholas Ka-Shing Kong, Daphne Yao, Murtuza Jadliwala, Bimal Viswanath · Jul 8, 2025 · Citations: 0

Automatic Metrics Coding Pairwise Preference Red Team
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How to use this page

Moderate trust

Use this for comparison and orientation, not as your only source.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

What to verify

Validate the evaluation procedure and quality controls in the full paper before operational use.

Evidence quality

Moderate

Derived from extracted protocol signals and abstract evidence.

Abstract

Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on untrusted datasets poses severe risks of injecting toxic behaviors. In this work, we introduce Optimus, a novel defense framework designed to mitigate fine-tuning harms while preserving conversational utility. Unlike existing defenses that rely heavily on precise toxicity detection or restrictive filtering, Optimus addresses the critical challenge of ensuring robust mitigation even when toxicity classifiers are imperfect or biased. Optimus integrates a training-free toxicity classification scheme that repurposes the safety alignment of commodity LLMs, and employs a dual-strategy alignment process combining synthetic "healing data" with Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to efficiently steer models toward safety. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Optimus mitigates toxicity even when relying on extremely biased classifiers (with up to 85% degradation in Recall). Optimus outperforms the state-of-the-art defense StarDSS and exhibits strong resilience against adaptive adversarial and jailbreak attacks. Our source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/secml-lab-vt/Optimus

Should You Rely On This Paper?

This paper has useful evaluation signal, but protocol completeness is partial; pair it with related papers before deciding implementation strategy.

Best use

Secondary protocol comparison source

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

No major weakness surfaced.

Trust level

Moderate

Usefulness score

65/100 • Medium

Useful as a secondary reference; validate protocol details against neighboring papers.

Human Feedback Signal

Detected

Evaluation Signal

Detected

Usefulness for eval research

Moderate-confidence candidate

Extraction confidence 70%

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

Human Eval Hub LLM-as-Judge Hub Pairwise Preference Hub Tool-Use Eval Hub

What We Could Verify

These are the protocol signals we could actually recover from the available paper metadata. Use them to decide whether this paper is worth deeper reading.

Human Feedback Types

strong

Pairwise Preference, Red Team

Directly usable for protocol triage.

"Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on untrusted datasets poses severe risks of injecting toxic behaviors."

Evaluation Modes

strong

Automatic Metrics

Includes extracted eval setup.

"Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on untrusted datasets poses severe risks of injecting toxic behaviors."

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

No explicit QC controls found.

"Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on untrusted datasets poses severe risks of injecting toxic behaviors."

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

No benchmark anchors detected.

"Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on untrusted datasets poses severe risks of injecting toxic behaviors."

Reported Metrics

strong

Recall, Toxicity

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

"Unlike existing defenses that rely heavily on precise toxicity detection or restrictive filtering, Optimus addresses the critical challenge of ensuring robust mitigation even when toxicity classifiers are imperfect or biased."

Human Feedback Details

  • Uses human feedback: Yes
  • Feedback types: Pairwise Preference, Red Team
  • Rater population: Not reported
  • Expertise required: Coding

Evaluation Details

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Evidence quality: Moderate
  • Use this page as: Secondary protocol comparison source

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

recalltoxicity

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on untrusted datasets poses severe risks of injecting toxic behaviors.

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Customizing Large Language Models (LLMs) on untrusted datasets poses severe risks of injecting toxic behaviors.
  • In this work, we introduce Optimus, a novel defense framework designed to mitigate fine-tuning harms while preserving conversational utility.
  • Unlike existing defenses that rely heavily on precise toxicity detection or restrictive filtering, Optimus addresses the critical challenge of ensuring robust mitigation even when toxicity classifiers are imperfect or biased.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Check the full text for explicit evaluation design choices (raters, protocol, and metrics).
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • In this work, we introduce Optimus, a novel defense framework designed to mitigate fine-tuning harms while preserving conversational utility.
  • Optimus integrates a training-free toxicity classification scheme that repurposes the safety alignment of commodity LLMs, and employs a dual-strategy alignment process combining synthetic "healing data" with Direct Preference Optimization…
  • Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Optimus mitigates toxicity even when relying on extremely biased classifiers (with up to 85% degradation in Recall).

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Optimus integrates a training-free toxicity classification scheme that repurposes the safety alignment of commodity LLMs, and employs a dual-strategy alignment process combining synthetic "healing data" with Direct Preference Optimization…
  • Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Optimus mitigates toxicity even when relying on extremely biased classifiers (with up to 85% degradation in Recall).

Researcher Checklist

  • Pass: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    Detected: Pairwise Preference, Red Team

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: recall, toxicity

Related Papers

Papers are ranked by protocol overlap, extraction signal alignment, and semantic proximity.

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