Active Adaptation, Not Static Defense: Temporal Dynamics of Preventative Steering in Adversarial Fine-Tuning — Paper

Abstract

Large language models remain fragile against malicious fine-tuning, motivating training-time defenses against harmful persona drift. Preventative Steering injects undesirable-trait persona vectors during fine-tuning and removes them at evaluation time, yet the mechanism behind its lasting protection remains unclear. Analyzing its temporal optimization dynamics, we find that the defense emerges from an early compensatory adaptation phase followed by a steady-state phase where the corrective signal decays; in parameter space, attention output projections emerge as the dominant residual-write route for defensive updates. Through Intervention Delta Preservation (IDP) and IDP Continuation experiments, we further show that preserving or reinjecting the weight offset fails to maintain protection, indicating that preventative steering relies on active adaptation rather than a static defense. Motivated by this finding, we propose Progressive Intensity Scheduling (PIS), which starts with a moderate injection strength and increases it after static-strength alignment begins to decay. Across the evaluated Qwen2.5 and Gemma-3 models, PIS improves safety robustness over static-strength steering while reducing harmful trait expression.

Authors 6

Jing Guan, Yachao Yang, Zhaoliang Liu, Yuyao Zhang, Fanyu Meng, Junlan Feng

Specification

Official page: arxiv.org/abs/2609.10142
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Arxiv announce type: cross
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
arXiv id: 2609.10142
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Categories: cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.CR, cs.LG
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
PDF: arxiv.org/pdf/2609.10142
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Primary category: cs.CL
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh
Published: 11 Sept 2026
Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 2 h agohigh

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Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

2 h ago

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None

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Authors: Jing Guan, Yachao Yang, Zhaoliang Liu

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Claim history · Official page

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Claim history for Official page
Value	Valid from → to	Status	Source	Confidence	Extractor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.10142	11 Sept 2026 21:03 UTC → current	current	arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1	high	deterministic

Claims are temporal and append-only: a new observation closes the previous claim (valid_to) instead of overwriting it. Conflicting claims from different sources are kept side by side and flagged — never averaged. Methodology →

11 Sept 2026
New paperPaperActive Adaptation, Not Static Defense: Temporal Dynamics of Preventative Steering in Adversarial Fine-Tuning
New paper: Active Adaptation, Not Static Defense: Temporal Dynamics of Preventative Steering in Adversarial Fine-Tuning
arxiv
rss.arxiv.org

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Source documents
Source	Document	Type	Tier	Last observed	Snapshots
arXiv (Atom API + RSS)	rss.arxiv.org/rss/cs.AI	feed	T1· Official	2 min ago	1

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