Efficiency vs. Alignment: Investigating Safety and Fairness Risks in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of LLMs
Organizations increasingly adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) from public repositories such as HuggingFace to downstream tasks. Prior work shows that even fine-tuning on benign datasets can weaken safety alignment, raising a practical question: does benign parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) also affect safety and fairness? We present the first large-scale, systematic study showing that benign PEFT can significantly alter both. We fine-tune four instruction-tuned model families (Meta-Llama-3-8B, Qwen2.5-7B, Mistral-7B, and Gemma-7B) with four widely used PEFT methods: LoRA, IA3, Prompt-Tuning, and P-Tuning. In total, we evaluate 235 conversationally fine-tuned variants across eleven safety hazard categories and nine fairness dimensions. We assess generalization beyond conversational tuning by incorporating a compact extension focused on coding tasks, involving 96 additional fine-tuned models. Results show that benign PEFT can induce detrimental alignment shifts. Adapter-based methods (LoRA, IA3) are generally safer and less disruptive to fairness, whereas prompt-based methods more often reduce safety and worsen fairness accuracy. Base model choice strongly moderates these effects: LLaMA is comparatively stable, Qwen shows modest gains, Gemma exhibits the steepest safety decline, and Mistral is the most variable. The coding-task extension also produces alignment shifts relative to base models, but matched comparisons with the conversational task reveal limited task-level differences. Overall, safety improvements do not reliably transfer to fairness, and no single configuration optimizes every fairness metric. These findings support a practical guideline for safety-critical deployment: benign intent does not guarantee safe behaviour; start from a well-aligned base model, favour adapter-based PEFT, and audit safety and fairness at the category level.