Law
A Comprehensive Survey in LLM(-Agent) Full Stack Safety: Data, Training and Deployment
Wang, Kun, Zhang, Guibin, Zhou, Zhenhong, Wu, Jiahao, Yu, Miao, Zhao, Shiqian, Yin, Chenlong, Fu, Jinhu, Yan, Yibo, Luo, Hanjun, Lin, Liang, Xu, Zhihao, Lu, Haolang, Cao, Xinye, Zhou, Xinyun, Jin, Weifei, Meng, Fanci, Xu, Shicheng, Mao, Junyuan, Wang, Yu, Wu, Hao, Wang, Minghe, Zhang, Fan, Fang, Junfeng, Qu, Wenjie, Liu, Yue, Liu, Chengwei, Zhang, Yifan, Li, Qiankun, Guo, Chongye, Qin, Yalan, Fan, Zhaoxin, Wang, Kai, Ding, Yi, Hong, Donghai, Ji, Jiaming, Lai, Yingxin, Yu, Zitong, Li, Xinfeng, Jiang, Yifan, Li, Yanhui, Deng, Xinyu, Wu, Junlin, Wang, Dongxia, Huang, Yihao, Guo, Yufei, Huang, Jen-tse, Wang, Qiufeng, Jin, Xiaolong, Wang, Wenxuan, Liu, Dongrui, Yue, Yanwei, Huang, Wenke, Wan, Guancheng, Chang, Heng, Li, Tianlin, Yu, Yi, Li, Chenghao, Li, Jiawei, Bai, Lei, Zhang, Jie, Guo, Qing, Wang, Jingyi, Chen, Tianlong, Zhou, Joey Tianyi, Jia, Xiaojun, Sun, Weisong, Wu, Cong, Chen, Jing, Hu, Xuming, Li, Yiming, Wang, Xiao, Zhang, Ningyu, Tuan, Luu Anh, Xu, Guowen, Zhang, Jiaheng, Zhang, Tianwei, Ma, Xingjun, Gu, Jindong, Pang, Liang, Wang, Xiang, An, Bo, Sun, Jun, Bansal, Mohit, Pan, Shirui, Lyu, Lingjuan, Elovici, Yuval, Kailkhura, Bhavya, Yang, Yaodong, Li, Hongwei, Xu, Wenyuan, Sun, Yizhou, Wang, Wei, Li, Qing, Tang, Ke, Jiang, Yu-Gang, Juefei-Xu, Felix, Xiong, Hui, Wang, Xiaofeng, Tao, Dacheng, Yu, Philip S., Wen, Qingsong, Liu, Yang
The remarkable success of Large Language Models (LLMs) has illuminated a promising pathway toward achieving Artificial General Intelligence for both academic and industrial communities, owing to their unprecedented performance across various applications. As LLMs continue to gain prominence in both research and commercial domains, their security and safety implications have become a growing concern, not only for researchers and corporations but also for every nation. Currently, existing surveys on LLM safety primarily focus on specific stages of the LLM lifecycle, e.g., deployment phase or fine-tuning phase, lacking a comprehensive understanding of the entire "lifechain" of LLMs. To address this gap, this paper introduces, for the first time, the concept of "full-stack" safety to systematically consider safety issues throughout the entire process of LLM training, deployment, and eventual commercialization. Compared to the off-the-shelf LLM safety surveys, our work demonstrates several distinctive advantages: (I) Comprehensive Perspective. We define the complete LLM lifecycle as encompassing data preparation, pre-training, post-training, deployment and final commercialization. To our knowledge, this represents the first safety survey to encompass the entire lifecycle of LLMs. (II) Extensive Literature Support. Our research is grounded in an exhaustive review of over 800+ papers, ensuring comprehensive coverage and systematic organization of security issues within a more holistic understanding. (III) Unique Insights. Through systematic literature analysis, we have developed reliable roadmaps and perspectives for each chapter. Our work identifies promising research directions, including safety in data generation, alignment techniques, model editing, and LLM-based agent systems. These insights provide valuable guidance for researchers pursuing future work in this field.
STAMP Your Content: Proving Dataset Membership via Watermarked Rephrasings
Rastogi, Saksham, Maini, Pratyush, Pruthi, Danish
Given how large parts of publicly available text are crawled to pretrain large language models (LLMs), data creators increasingly worry about the inclusion of their proprietary data for model training without attribution or licensing. Their concerns are also shared by benchmark curators whose test-sets might be compromised. In this paper, we present STAMP, a framework for detecting dataset membership-i.e., determining the inclusion of a dataset in the pretraining corpora of LLMs. Given an original piece of content, our proposal involves first generating multiple rephrases, each embedding a watermark with a unique secret key. One version is to be released publicly, while others are to be kept private. Subsequently, creators can compare model likelihoods between public and private versions using paired statistical tests to prove membership. We show that our framework can successfully detect contamination across four benchmarks which appear only once in the training data and constitute less than 0.001% of the total tokens, outperforming several contamination detection and dataset inference baselines. We verify that STAMP preserves both the semantic meaning and utility of the original data. We apply STAMP to two real-world scenarios to confirm the inclusion of paper abstracts and blog articles in the pretraining corpora.
Legal Mathematical Reasoning with LLMs: Procedural Alignment through Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Kepu, Xie, Guofu, Yu, Weijie, Xu, Mingyue, Tang, Xu, Li, Yaxin, Xu, Jun
Legal mathematical reasoning is essential for applying large language models (LLMs) in high-stakes legal contexts, where outputs must be both mathematically accurate and procedurally compliant. However, existing legal LLMs lack structured numerical reasoning, and open-domain models, though capable of calculations, often overlook mandatory legal steps. To address this, we present LexNum, the first Chinese legal mathematical reasoning benchmark, covering three representative scenarios where each instance reflects legally grounded procedural flows. We further propose LexPam, a two-stage reinforcement learning framework for efficient legal reasoning training. Leveraging curriculum learning, we use a stronger teacher model to partition data into basic and challenging subsets. A lightweight 1.5B student model is then fine-tuned with Group Relative Policy Optimization, which avoids costly value networks and enables stable training from sparse, end-of-sequence rewards. The first stage improves accuracy and format; the second introduces a novel reward to guide procedural alignment via task-specific legal elements. Experiments show that existing models perform poorly on LexNum, while LexPam enhances both mathematical accuracy and legal coherence, and generalizes effectively across tasks and domains.
Disentangling AI Alignment: A Structured Taxonomy Beyond Safety and Ethics
Recent advances in AI research make it increasingly plausible that artificial agents with consequential real-world impact will soon operate beyond tightly controlled environments. Ensuring that these agents are not only safe but that they adhere to broader normative expectations is thus an urgent interdisciplinary challenge. Multiple fields -- notably AI Safety, AI Alignment, and Machine Ethics -- claim to contribute to this task. However, the conceptual boundaries and interrelations among these domains remain vague, leaving researchers without clear guidance in positioning their work. To address this meta-challenge, we develop a structured conceptual framework for understanding AI alignment. Rather than focusing solely on alignment goals, we introduce a taxonomy distinguishing the alignment aim (safety, ethicality, legality, etc.), scope (outcome vs. execution), and constituency (individual vs. collective). This structural approach reveals multiple legitimate alignment configurations, providing a foundation for practical and philosophical integration across domains, and clarifying what it might mean for an agent to be aligned all-things-considered.
London AI firm says Getty copyright case poses 'overt threat' to industry
Stability allows users to generate images using text prompts, and its directors include James Cameron, the Oscar-winning film director of Avatar and Titanic. But Getty called the people who were training the AI system "a bunch of tech geeks" and claimed they were indifferent to the problems their innovation might create. Stability countered by alleging that Getty was using "fanciful" legal routes and spending approximately 10m to fight a technology it feared was "an existential threat" to its business. As a result the program, called Stability Diffusion, outputs images with Getty Images watermarks still on them. Getty alleges that Stability was "completely indifferent to what they fed into the training data".
System-Aware Unlearning Algorithms: Use Lesser, Forget Faster
Lu, Linda, Sekhari, Ayush, Sridharan, Karthik
Machine unlearning addresses the problem of updating a machine learning model/system trained on a dataset $S$ so that the influence of a set of deletion requests $U \subseteq S$ on the unlearned model is minimized. The gold standard definition of unlearning demands that the updated model, after deletion, be nearly identical to the model obtained by retraining. This definition is designed for a worst-case attacker (one who can recover not only the unlearned model but also the remaining data samples, i.e., $S \setminus U$). Such a stringent definition has made developing efficient unlearning algorithms challenging. However, such strong attackers are also unrealistic. In this work, we propose a new definition, system-aware unlearning, which aims to provide unlearning guarantees against an attacker that can at best only gain access to the data stored in the system for learning/unlearning requests and not all of $S\setminus U$. With this new definition, we use the simple intuition that if a system can store less to make its learning/unlearning updates, it can be more secure and update more efficiently against a system-aware attacker. Towards that end, we present an exact system-aware unlearning algorithm for linear classification using a selective sampling-based approach, and we generalize the method for classification with general function classes. We theoretically analyze the tradeoffs between deletion capacity, accuracy, memory, and computation time.
Simple Yet Effective: Extracting Private Data Across Clients in Federated Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Hu, Yingqi, Zhang, Zhuo, Zhang, Jingyuan, Qu, Lizhen, Xu, Zenglin
Federated fine-tuning of large language models (FedLLMs) presents a promising approach for achieving strong model performance while preserving data privacy in sensitive domains. However, the inherent memorization ability of LLMs makes them vulnerable to training data extraction attacks. To investigate this risk, we introduce simple yet effective extraction attack algorithms specifically designed for FedLLMs. In contrast to prior "verbatim" extraction attacks, which assume access to fragments from all training data, our approach operates under a more realistic threat model, where the attacker only has access to a single client's data and aims to extract previously unseen personally identifiable information (PII) from other clients. This requires leveraging contextual prefixes held by the attacker to generalize across clients. To evaluate the effectiveness of our approaches, we propose two rigorous metrics-coverage rate and efficiency-and extend a real-world legal dataset with PII annotations aligned with CPIS, GDPR, and CCPA standards, achieving 89.9% human-verified precision. Experimental results show that our method can extract up to 56.57% of victim-exclusive PII, with "Address," "Birthday," and "Name" being the most vulnerable categories. Our findings underscore the pressing need for robust defense strategies and contribute a new benchmark and evaluation framework for future research in privacy-preserving federated learning.
Hey, That's My Data! Label-Only Dataset Inference in Large Language Models
Xiong, Chen, Wang, Zihao, Zhu, Rui, Ho, Tsung-Yi, Chen, Pin-Yu, Xiong, Jingwei, Tang, Haixu, Ohno-Machado, Lucila
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing by excelling at interpreting, reasoning about, and generating human language. However, their reliance on large-scale, often proprietary datasets poses a critical challenge: unauthorized usage of such data can lead to copyright infringement and significant financial harm. Existing dataset-inference methods typically depend on log probabilities to detect suspicious training material, yet many leading LLMs have begun withholding or obfuscating these signals. This reality underscores the pressing need for label-only approaches capable of identifying dataset membership without relying on internal model logits. We address this gap by introducing CatShift, a label-only dataset-inference framework that capitalizes on catastrophic forgetting: the tendency of an LLM to overwrite previously learned knowledge when exposed to new data. If a suspicious dataset was previously seen by the model, fine-tuning on a portion of it triggers a pronounced post-tuning shift in the model's outputs; conversely, truly novel data elicits more modest changes. By comparing the model's output shifts for a suspicious dataset against those for a known non-member validation set, we statistically determine whether the suspicious set is likely to have been part of the model's original training corpus. Extensive experiments on both open-source and API-based LLMs validate CatShift's effectiveness in logit-inaccessible settings, offering a robust and practical solution for safeguarding proprietary data.
What Really is a Member? Discrediting Membership Inference via Poisoning
Mangaokar, Neal, Hooda, Ashish, Li, Zhuohang, Malin, Bradley A., Fawaz, Kassem, Jha, Somesh, Prakash, Atul, Chowdhury, Amrita Roy
Membership inference tests aim to determine whether a particular data point was included in a language model's training set. However, recent works have shown that such tests often fail under the strict definition of membership based on exact matching, and have suggested relaxing this definition to include semantic neighbors as members as well. In this work, we show that membership inference tests are still unreliable under this relaxation - it is possible to poison the training dataset in a way that causes the test to produce incorrect predictions for a target point. We theoretically reveal a trade-off between a test's accuracy and its robustness to poisoning. We also present a concrete instantiation of this poisoning attack and empirically validate its effectiveness. Our results show that it can degrade the performance of existing tests to well below random.
LengClaro2023: A Dataset of Administrative Texts in Spanish with Plain Language adaptations
Agüera-Marco, Belén, Gonzalez-Dios, Itziar
In this work, we present LengClaro2023, a dataset of legal-administrative texts in Spanish. Based on the most frequently used procedures from the Spanish Social Security website, we have created for each text two simplified equivalents. The first version follows the recommendations provided by arText claro. The second version incorporates additional recommendations from plain language guidelines to explore further potential improvements in the system. The linguistic resource created in this work can be used for evaluating automatic text simplification (ATS) systems in Spanish.