CLEAR: Continuous Latent Adapter Routing for Utility-Preserving LLM Safety Alignment
Improving the safety of large language models (LLMs) often comes at the expense of utility, as globally applied safety tuning may affect model responses to both harmful and benign inputs. We propose \textbf{C}ontinuous \textbf{L}at\textbf{E}nt \textbf{A}dapter \textbf{R}outing (CLEAR), a conditional safety adaptation framework that uses a lightweight hidden-state gate to continuously control the activation strength of a safety low-rank adapter. CLEAR aims to reduce harmful completions while avoiding unnecessary changes to the frozen backbone that could degrade performance on benign prompts. Experiments on widely used safety and utility benchmarks show that CLEAR improves robustness on Har...
| Authors | Chengxiao Wang, Enyi Jiang, Xiaojing Liao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 21 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 August 2026 |
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