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Related papers: On Prompt-Driven Safeguarding for Large Language M…

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While large language models (LLMs) have seen unprecedented advancements in capabilities and applications across a variety of use-cases, safety alignment of these models is still an area of active research. The fragile nature of LLMs, even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Amrita Bhattacharjee , Shaona Ghosh , Traian Rebedea , Christopher Parisien

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. Although there are diverse jailbreak attack strategies, there is no unified understanding on why some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Yuping Lin , Pengfei He , Han Xu , Yue Xing , Makoto Yamada , Hui Liu , Jiliang Tang

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) sometimes falsely refuse pseudo-harmful prompts, like "how to kill a mosquito," which are actually harmless. Frequent false refusals not only frustrate users but also provoke a public backlash…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Bang An , Sicheng Zhu , Ruiyi Zhang , Michael-Andrei Panaitescu-Liess , Yuancheng Xu , Furong Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to off-topic misuse, where users may prompt these models to perform tasks beyond their intended scope. Current guardrails, which often rely on curated examples or custom classifiers, suffer from high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-10 Gabriel Chua , Shing Yee Chan , Shaun Khoo

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful text generators, yet they can produce toxic or harmful content even when given seemingly harmless prompts. This presents a serious safety challenge and can cause real-world harm. Toxicity is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Himanshu Singh , Ziwei Xu , A. V. Subramanyam , Mohan Kankanhalli

LLM-powered applications routinely embed secrets in system prompts, yet models can be tricked into revealing them. We built an adaptive attacker that evolves its strategies over hundreds of rounds and tested it against nine defense…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Priyal Deep , Shane Emmons , Amy Fox , Kyle Bacon , Kelley McAllister , Peter Ortiz , Krisztian Flautner

The drastic increase of large language models' (LLMs) parameters has led to a new research direction of fine-tuning-free downstream customization by prompts, i.e., task descriptions. While these prompt-based services (e.g. OpenAI's GPTs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Zi Liang , Haibo Hu , Qingqing Ye , Yaxin Xiao , Haoyang Li

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), encounter the challenge of distribution shift. Current approaches typically address this issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Qiyuan Deng , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yaowei Wang , Liqiang Nie , Min Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by advancing natural language understanding and generation, enabling applications across fields beyond healthcare, software engineering, and conversational systems.…

Large language models (LLMs) excel in diverse applications but face dual challenges: generating harmful content under jailbreak attacks and over-refusal of benign queries due to rigid safety mechanisms. These issues are further complicated…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yifan Xia , Guorui Chen , Wenqian Yu , Zhijiang Li , Philip Torr , Jindong Gu

Fine-tuning language models is commonly believed to inevitably harm their safety, i.e., refusing to respond to harmful user requests, even when using harmless datasets, thus requiring additional safety measures. We challenge this belief…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Minseon Kim , Jin Myung Kwak , Lama Alssum , Bernard Ghanem , Philip Torr , David Krueger , Fazl Barez , Adel Bibi

System prompts provide a lightweight yet powerful mechanism for conditioning large language models (LLMs) at inference time. While prior work has focused on English-only settings, real-world deployments benefit from having a single prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Lechen Zhang , Yusheng Zhou , Tolga Ergen , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Moontae Lee , David Jurgens

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, they pose potential safety concerns, such as the ``jailbreak'' problem, wherein malicious instructions can manipulate LLMs to exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Yue Deng , Wenxuan Zhang , Sinno Jialin Pan , Lidong Bing

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly expose chain-of-thought-like reasoning for transparency, verification, and deliberate problem solving. This creates a safety blind spot: harmful or policy-violating content may appear in reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xiaomin Li , Jianheng Hou , Zheyuan Deng , Zhiwei Zhang , Taoran Li , Binghang Lu , Bing Hu , Yunhan Zhao , Yuexing Hao

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) unlock powerful multimodal reasoning but also expand the attack surface, particularly through adversarial inputs that conceal harmful goals in benign prompts. We propose SHIELD, a lightweight,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Juan Ren , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

The performance of large language models (LLMs) is significantly influenced by the quality of the prompts provided. In response, researchers have developed enormous prompt engineering strategies aimed at modifying the prompt text to enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Zhiyuan He , Huiqiang Jiang , Zilong Wang , Yuqing Yang , Luna Qiu , Lili Qiu

Large language models demonstrate powerful capabilities across various natural language processing tasks, yet they also harbor safety vulnerabilities. To enhance LLM safety, various jailbreak defense methods have been proposed to guard…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Junbo Zhang , Ran Chen , Qianli Zhou , Xinyang Deng , Wen Jiang

The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has introduced critical security challenges, where adversarial actors can manipulate input prompts to cause significant harm and circumvent safety alignments. These prompt-based attacks…

Prompt quality plays a central role in controlling the behavior, reliability, and reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly for smaller open-source instruction-tuned models that depend heavily on explicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Prith Sharma , Austin Z. Henley

Large language models (LLMs) are vital for a wide range of applications yet remain susceptible to jailbreak threats, which could lead to the generation of inappropriate responses. Conventional defenses, such as refusal and adversarial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Xianglin Yang , Gelei Deng , Jieming Shi , Tianwei Zhang , Jin Song Dong