Mark, Don't Erase: Token Inoculation for Dual-Use Knowledge in LLMs

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2607.18639v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety interventions on dual-use knowledge typically choose between destroying hazardous content (e.g., unlearning, filtering) and suppressing it at the output layer (e.g., refusal training); both pay a tax in adjacent-domain competence or over-refusal. We argue that the right operation is conditioning, not reduction: we show that hazardous knowledge can be retained in the model and behaviorally gated by a privileged control token. Our method, Token Inoculation, introduces a binding-and-branching approach. First, during continued pre-training, we mark hazardous content by inserting a special token alongside dual-use documents, so the model binds the marker to the underlying semantics of the hazardous domain. Second, during supervised fine-tun