Restoring General and Improving Domain-Specific Safety in Fine-Tuned LLMs Without Retraining

Vishnu Kabir Chhabra, Ding Zhu, Zhihui Zhu, Xueru Zhang, Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

Safety-aligned language models are known to suffer degradation in refusal behavior following domain-specific fine-tuning, even when the fine-tuning data is entirely benign. The predominant mitigation strategy, preference optimization on the fine-tuned model, is computationally expensive and requires domain-specific preference data that is often unavailable in practice. We propose SPECTRA, a training-free, weight-level method that restores refusal behavior by transferring the base model's refusal direction into the fine-tuned model's weights via an activation-aware, low-rank update, requiring no gradient-based optimization or domain-specific safety data. The low-rank design restricts the intervention to the subspace most causally active on harmful inputs, leaving benign behavior largely undisturbed by construction. Empirically, SPECTRA substantially improves refusal behavior across a comprehensive safety evaluation, while preserving general coherence, domain-specific knowledge, and producing negligible change in false refusal rates.