Adaptive Defense against Harmful Fine-Tuning for Large Language Models via Bayesian Data SchedulerZixuan Hu, Li Shen, Zhenyi Wang et al.
Harmful fine-tuning poses critical safety risks to fine-tuning-as-a-service for large language models. Existing defense strategies preemptively build robustness via attack simulation but suffer from fundamental limitations: (i) the infeasibility of extending attack simulations beyond bounded threat models due to the inherent difficulty of anticipating unknown attacks, and (ii) limited adaptability to varying attack settings, as simulation fails to capture their variability and complexity. To address these challenges, we propose Bayesian Data Scheduler (BDS), an adaptive tuning-stage defense strategy with no need for attack simulation. BDS formulates harmful fine-tuning defense as a Bayesian inference problem, learning the posterior distribution of each data point's safety attribute, conditioned on the fine-tuning and alignment datasets. The fine-tuning process is then constrained by weighting data with their safety attributes sampled from the posterior, thus mitigating the influence of harmful data. By leveraging the post hoc nature of Bayesian inference, the posterior is conditioned on the fine-tuning dataset, enabling BDS to tailor its defense to the specific dataset, thereby achieving adaptive defense. Furthermore, we introduce a neural scheduler based on amortized Bayesian learning, enabling efficient transfer to new data without retraining. Comprehensive results across diverse attack and defense settings demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of our approach. Code is available at https://github.com/Egg-Hu/Bayesian-Data-Scheduler.
9.6AIJun 24, 2025
Position: Intelligent Science Laboratory Requires the Integration of Cognitive and Embodied AISha Zhang, Suorong Yang, Tong Xie et al.
Scientific discovery has long been constrained by human limitations in expertise, physical capability, and sleep cycles. The recent rise of AI scientists and automated laboratories has accelerated both the cognitive and operational aspects of research. However, key limitations persist: AI systems are often confined to virtual environments, while automated laboratories lack the flexibility and autonomy to adaptively test new hypotheses in the physical world. Recent advances in embodied AI, such as generalist robot foundation models, diffusion-based action policies, fine-grained manipulation learning, and sim-to-real transfer, highlight the promise of integrating cognitive and embodied intelligence. This convergence opens the door to closed-loop systems that support iterative, autonomous experimentation and the possibility of serendipitous discovery. In this position paper, we propose the paradigm of Intelligent Science Laboratories (ISLs): a multi-layered, closed-loop framework that deeply integrates cognitive and embodied intelligence. ISLs unify foundation models for scientific reasoning, agent-based workflow orchestration, and embodied agents for robust physical experimentation. We argue that such systems are essential for overcoming the current limitations of scientific discovery and for realizing the full transformative potential of AI-driven science.