The first systematic cross-domain, cross-architecture empirical study quantifying the trustworthiness cost of domain adaptation across three SLM architectures and challenging the assumption that replay-based and arithmetic-merge strategies transfer alignment to domain-adapted SLMs.
Abstract
Domain adaptation of small language models (SLMs) has emerged as a practical strategy for deploying capable NLP systems in resource-constrained, high-stakes environments including healthcare, legal services, and financial analysis. While performance gains from parameter-efficient fine-tuning are well characterised, the corresponding impact on trustworthiness (factual calibration and adversarial robustness) remains poorly understood. This paper presents the first systematic cross-domain, cross-architecture empirical study quantifying the trustworthiness cost of domain adaptation across three SLM architectures (TinyLlama 1B, Gemma-2 2B, Llama 3.2 1B), three domains (healthcare, legal, finance), two training-data conditions (benign and adversarially perturbed), and four fine-tuning strategies (baseline LoRA, Safety-DPO, Dark Experience Replay, and Task Arithmetic LoRA, TA-LoRA). Trustworthiness is evaluated through TruthfulQA MC2 (factual calibration) and HarmBench ASR (adversarial robustness) across all 216 experimental configurations with three random seeds. Three principal findings emerge. First, baseline QLoRA domain adaptation produces minimal TruthfulQA MC2 change across all model-domain combinations (mean |Delta TQA|<0.02). Second, adversarially perturbed training data consistently improves domain adaptation quality (Delta loss approximately -0.040) without worsening trustworthiness benchmarks. Third, none of the three safety-preserving strategies reduced adversarial harm susceptibility: Safety-DPO was effectively neutral (mean Delta ASR<0.001), while Dark ER and TA-LoRA increased mean HarmBench ASR by +0.171 and +0.155 respectively in safety-aligned models (Gemma-2 2B, Llama 3.2 1B), with individual configurations exceeding +0.45. These results challenge the assumption that replay-based and arithmetic-merge strategies transfer alignment to domain-adapted SLMs.
Small Language Models (SLMs) have emerged as a more efficient alternative to traditional Large Language Models (LLMs), offering promising potential in resource-constrained scenarios. Existing approaches to building SLMs typically follow two paths: training compact models from scratch, or compressing larger pre-trained models using methods such as pruning, quantization, or distillation. As language models become increasingly integrated into real-world applications, ensuring their trustworthiness has become a critical concern. However, how to build trustworthy SLMs remains an underexplored question. In this work, we present a comprehensive evaluation of SLM trustworthiness across multiple dimensions, including fairness, robustness, privacy, and ethics. We first examine the effects of pruning and quantization, and find that quantization is significantly more effective in preserving trustworthiness compared to pruning. More importantly, we demonstrate that compressing a reliable large model via quantization can produce SLMs with superior trustworthiness and adaptability compared to using small models trained from scratch. Furthermore, knowledge distillation from trustworthy teacher models can further enhance the reliability of SLMs. We hope our findings provide practical guidance and a foundation for future research into the development and deployment of trustworthy small language models.
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Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded as core components of data-centric systems, supporting analytical decision making, and automated reasoning over large-scale, heterogeneous datasets. Yet their deployment in open-world environments raises fundamental challenges to security and trustworthiness: LLMs can leak sensitive data, fall prey to prompt injection and jailbreaks, generate misinformation, and behave unpredictably under adversarial inputs, failures that propagate through data pipelines and affect downstream decisions. The rise of LLM-based agents further amplifies these risks through unsafe tool use and autonomous decision-making. The 2nd SeT-LLM Workshop on Secure and Trustworthy Large Language Models brings together researchers and practitioners from data mining, machine learning, security, and responsible AI to address these issues from a data-centric, system-level perspective, spanning robust defenses, trustworthy evaluation, privacy and copyright protection, robustness, alignment and safety, agent security, and high-stakes applications. Through invited talks, contributed papers, a poster session, and a panel discussion, the workshop prioritizes early-stage ideas, system experiences, and open problems across the lifecycle of LLM-based systems.
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