Related papers: Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pretrained on extensive multilingual corpora to acquire both language-specific cultural knowledge and general knowledge. Ideally, while LLMs should provide consistent responses to culture-independent…

Large language models often fail to satisfy formatting instructions when they must simultaneously perform demanding tasks. We study this behaviour through a prospective memory inspired lens from cognitive psychology, using a controlled…

Large language models (LLMs) aligned for safety often suffer from over-refusal, the tendency to reject seemingly toxic or benign prompts by misclassifying them as toxic. This behavior undermines models' helpfulness and restricts usability…

Decoding strategies manipulate the probability distribution underlying the output of a language model and can therefore affect both generation quality and its uncertainty. In this study, we investigate the impact of decoding strategies on…

Ensuring that large language models (LMs) are fair, robust and useful requires an understanding of how different modifications to their inputs impact the model's behaviour. In the context of open-text generation tasks, however, such an…

When trained on large, unfiltered crawls from the internet, language models pick up and reproduce all kinds of undesirable biases that can be found in the data: they often generate racist, sexist, violent or otherwise toxic language. As…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs), particularly for cybersecurity tasks, primarily focuses on preventing misuse. While this approach reduces direct harm, it obscures a complementary failure mode: denial of assistance to…

In-Context Learning (ICL) enables large language models (LLMs) to achieve rapid task adaptation by learning from demonstrations. With the increase in available context length of LLMs, recent experiments have shown that the performance of…

In-context learning enables large language models (LLMs) to perform a variety of tasks, including learning to make reward-maximizing choices in simple bandit tasks. Given their potential use as (autonomous) decision-making agents, it is…

Large language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, but can they accurately predict when they will refuse before responding? We investigate this question through a systematic study where models first predict their refusal…

As large language models (LLMs) become easily accessible nowadays, the trade-off between safety and helpfulness can significantly impact user experience. A model that prioritizes safety will cause users to feel less engaged and assisted…

Large Language Models (LLMs) still produce gender-stereotyped language even in occupation-neutral contexts that reflect deep societal biases (Rudinger et al., 2018). To address this, prior work has proposed prompting, constrained decoding…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) benchmarks, yet they remain highly vulnerable to minor input perturbations. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate Token…

Many studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can produce harmful responses, exposing users to unexpected risks when LLMs are deployed. Previous studies have proposed comprehensive taxonomies of the risks posed by LLMs,…

Recent research on large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to understand and employ deceptive behavior, even without explicit prompting. However, such behavior has only been observed in rare, specialized cases and has…

Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly rely on explicit refusal prefixes for safety, making them vulnerable to prefix injection attacks. We introduce HumorReject, a novel data-driven approach that reimagines LLM safety by decoupling it from…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly consulted for high-stakes life advice, yet they lack standard safeguards against providing confident but misguided responses. This creates risks of sycophancy and over-confidence. This paper…

The design of safety-critical agents based on large language models (LLMs) requires more than simple prompt engineering. This paper presents a comprehensive information-theoretic analysis of how rule encodings in system prompts influence…

We investigate the performance of large language models on repetitive deterministic prediction tasks and study how the sequence accuracy rate scales with output length. Each such task involves repeating the same operation n times. Examples…