English
Related papers

Related papers: Trojan Activation Attack: Red-Teaming Large Langua…

200 papers

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is achieved through fine-tuning mechanisms that regulate neuron activations to suppress harmful content. In this work, we propose a novel approach to induce disalignment by identifying and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Yi Zhou , Wenpeng Xing , Dezhang Kong , Changting Lin , Meng Han

The fast advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving an increasing number of applications. Together with the growing number of users, we also see an increasing number of attackers who try to outsmart these systems. They want…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Patrick Levi , Christoph P. Neumann

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively used across diverse domains, including virtual assistants, automated code generation, and scientific research. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which manipulate the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Haoran Gu , Handing Wang , Yi Mei , Mengjie Zhang , Yaochu Jin

Activation-based steering enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to exhibit targeted behaviors by intervening on intermediate activations without retraining. Despite its widespread use, the mechanistic factors that govern when steering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Mehdi Jafari , Hao Xue , Flora Salim

Despite extensive efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Activation steering offers a training-free defense method but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yulin Hu , Yang Deng , An Zhang , Xingyu Sui , Xinyang Han , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu

The memorization of training data by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks, including privacy leaks and the regurgitation of copyrighted content. Activation steering, a technique that directly intervenes in model activations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Manan Suri , Nishit Anand , Amisha Bhaskar

Prompt injection attack, where an attacker injects a prompt into the original one, aiming to make an Large Language Model (LLM) follow the injected prompt to perform an attacker-chosen task, represent a critical security threat. Existing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Zedian Shao , Hongbin Liu , Jaden Mu , Neil Zhenqiang Gong

Controlling undesirable Large Language Model (LLM) behaviors, such as the generation of unsafe content or failing to adhere to safety guidelines, often relies on costly fine-tuning. Activation steering provides an alternative for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Amr Hegazy , Mostafa Elhoushi , Amr Alanwar

Recent studies on the safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) have revealed that existing approaches often operate superficially, leaving models vulnerable to various adversarial attacks. Despite their significance, these studies…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Jianwei Li , Jung-Eun Kim

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools, but their inherent safety risks - ranging from harmful content generation to broader societal harms - pose significant challenges. These risks can be amplified by the recent…

Large language models (LLMs), despite being safety-aligned, exhibit brittle refusal behaviors that can be circumvented by simple linguistic changes. As tense jailbreaking demonstrates that models refusing harmful requests often comply when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yein Park , Jungwoo Park , Jaewoo Kang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various domains, but their vulnerability to trojan or backdoor attacks poses significant security risks. This paper explores the challenges and insights gained from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Narek Maloyan , Ekansh Verma , Bulat Nutfullin , Bislan Ashinov

Evaluations of large language model (LLM) risks and capabilities are increasingly being incorporated into AI risk management and governance frameworks. Currently, most risk evaluations are conducted by designing inputs that elicit harmful…

A key challenge in AI alignment is guiding large language models (LLMs) to follow desired behaviors at test time. Activation steering, which modifies internal model activations during inference, offers a potential solution. However, prior…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Reza Bayat , Ali Rahimi-Kalahroudi , Mohammad Pezeshki , Sarath Chandar , Pascal Vincent

Large language models (LLMs) sometimes exhibit dangerous unintended behaviors. Finding and fixing these is challenging because the attack surface is massive -- it is not tractable to exhaustively search for all possible inputs that may…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-10 Adriano Hernandez

Warning: This article includes red-teaming experiments, which contain examples of compromised LLM responses that may be offensive or upsetting. Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to create harmful content, such as generating…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Ali Raza , Gurang Gupta , Nikolay Matyunin , Jibesh Patra

Large language models (LLMs) and LLM-based agents have been widely deployed in a wide range of applications in the real world, including healthcare diagnostics, financial analysis, customer support, robotics, and autonomous driving,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Wenrui Xu , Keshab K. Parhi

An unintended consequence of the vast pretraining of Large Language Models (LLMs) is the verbatim memorization of fragments of their training data, which may contain sensitive or copyrighted information. In recent years, unlearning has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-06 Atakan Seyitoğlu , Aleksei Kuvshinov , Leo Schwinn , Stephan Günnemann

Trojan backdoors can be injected into large language models at various stages, including pretraining, fine-tuning, and in-context learning, posing a significant threat to the model's alignment. Due to the nature of causal language modeling,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Vedant Bhasin , Matthew Yudin , Razvan Stefanescu , Rauf Izmailov

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in K--12 education offers both transformative opportunities and emerging risks. This study explores how students may Trojanize prompts to elicit unsafe or unintended outputs from LLMs,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Richard M. Charles , James H. Curry , Richard B. Charles