Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs

Role-playing enables large language models (LLMs) to engage users in immersive and personalized interactions, but it also introduces significant safety risks. Existing role-play fine-tuning techniques improve role adaptability but may degrade safety performance, particularly for villainous characters. In this work, we conduct the first comprehensive assessment of role-play fine-tuning risks by training 95 role-specific LLMs using RoleBench. Our experiments reveal that role-play fine-tuning leads to a noticeable decline in safety performance, with safety risks varying based on character traits. To tackle this challenge, we propose Safety-Aware Role-Play Fine-Tuning (SaRFT), a novel method designed to balance role-playing capabilities and safety. Extensive experiments on LLaMA-3-8B-Instruct, Gemma-2-9B-it, and Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct demonstrate that SaRFT consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both LoRA and full-parameter fine-tuning settings. Our findings highlight the necessity of role-adaptive safety measures and provide insights into mitigating role-specific safety risks in role-playing LLMs.

@article{zhao2025_2502.20968,
  title={ Beware of Your Po! Measuring and Mitigating AI Safety Risks in Role-Play Fine-Tuning of LLMs },
  author={ Weixiang Zhao and Yulin Hu and Yang Deng and Jiahe Guo and Xingyu Sui and Xinyang Han and An Zhang and Yanyan Zhao and Bing Qin and Tat-Seng Chua and Ting Liu },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.20968},
  year={ 2025 }
}