{"id":363065,"date":"2026-03-24T19:29:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-24T19:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/363065\/"},"modified":"2026-03-24T19:29:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T19:29:09","slug":"ai-neuron-freezing-offers-safety-breakthrough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/363065\/","title":{"rendered":"AI \u2018neuron freezing\u2019 offers safety breakthrough"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Researchers Researchers found discovered a new way to introduce safety guardrails for large language models that power apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini (Getty\/iStock) <\/p>\n

Artificial intelligence<\/a> researchers have developed a novel technique to make ChatGPT<\/a> and other popular chatbots safer.<\/p>\n

The method, referred to as \u201cneuron freezing\u201d, prevents users from bypassing the built-in safety filters of the large language models (LLMs) underpinning these AI tools.<\/p>\n

Currently, these LLMs treat safety as a binary checkpoint at the start of generating an answer; If a query appears safe, the AI will proceed, but if it seems dangerous then it will refuse.<\/p>\n

Users have been able to find ways of getting round these checks by framing harmful prompts in different context. One study<\/a> last year, for example, found that AI safety measures could be bypassed by rephrasing a nefarious prompt as a poem.<\/p>\n

These workarounds require retraining or individual patches in order to fix them, but the new research offers a way to hard code ethical boundaries into LLMs to prevent misuse.<\/p>\n

The breakthrough, made by a team at North Carolina State University, involves identifying specific safety-critical \u201cneurons\u201d within the neural network and freezing them in order to retain the safety characteristics \u2013 no matter how the task is defined by a user.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur goal with this work was to provide a better understanding of existing safety alignment issues and outline a new direction for how to implement a non-superficial safety alignment for LLMs,\u201d said Jianwei Li, a PhD student at NC State University who led the research.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe found that \u2018freezing\u2019 these specific neurons during the fine-tuning process allows the model to retain the safety characteristics of the original model while adapting to new tasks in a specific domain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jung-Eun Kim, an assistant professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, added: \u201cThe big picture here is that we have developed a hypothesis that serves as a conceptual framework for understanding the challenges associated with safety alignment in LLMs, used that framework to identify a technique that helps us address one of those challenges, and then demonstrated that the technique works.\u201d<\/p>\n

The researchers hope their work will help serve as a foundation to develop new techniques that allow AI models to continuously reevaluate whether their reasoning is safe or unsafe while generating responses.<\/p>\n

The breakthrough was detailed in a paper, titled \u2018Superficial safety alignment hypothesis\u2019, which is due to be presented next month at the Fourteenth International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR2026) in Brazil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers found discovered a new way to introduce safety guardrails for large language models that power apps like…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":363066,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[163912,218,61,60,22746,163911,80],"class_list":["post-363065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technology","tag-ai-safety-measures","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-north-carolina-state-university","tag-safety-characteristics","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363065","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}