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Related papers: Mitigating Exaggerated Safety in Large Language Mo…

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Red-teaming has been a widely adopted way to evaluate the harmfulness of Large Language Models (LLMs). It aims to jailbreak a model's safety behavior to make it act as a helpful agent disregarding the harmfulness of the query. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-14 Rishabh Bhardwaj , Soujanya Poria

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

Safety fine-tuning of language models typically requires a curated adversarial dataset. We take a different approach: score each candidate prompt's difficulty by how often the target model's own rollouts are judged harmful, then fine-tune…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Prakhar Gupta , Garv Shah , Donghua Zhang

Prompting language models (LMs) with training examples and task descriptions has been seen as critical to recent successes in few-shot learning. In this work, we show that finetuning LMs in the few-shot setting can considerably reduce the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-07-02 Robert L. Logan , Ivana Balažević , Eric Wallace , Fabio Petroni , Sameer Singh , Sebastian Riedel

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world systems. Given their broader applicability, prompt engineering has become an efficient tool for resource-scarce organizations to adopt LLMs for their own purposes. At the same…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Piyush Jaiswal , Aaditya Pratap , Shreyansh Saraswati , Harsh Kasyap , Somanath Tripathy

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to a sophisticated form of adversarial prompting known as camouflaged jailbreaking. This method embeds malicious intent within seemingly benign language to evade existing safety…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Youjia Zheng , Mohammad Zandsalimy , Shanu Sushmita

In this study, we propose a homotopy-inspired prompt obfuscation framework to enhance understanding of security and safety vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). By systematically applying carefully engineered prompts, we…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Luis Lazo , Hamed Jelodar , Roozbeh Razavi-Far

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed task automation and content generation across various domains while incorporating safety filters to prevent misuse. We introduce a novel jailbreaking framework that employs distributed prompt…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Johan Wahréus , Ahmed Hussain , Panos Papadimitratos

Prepending model inputs with safety prompts is a common practice for safeguarding large language models (LLMs) against queries with harmful intents. However, the underlying working mechanisms of safety prompts have not been unraveled yet,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Chujie Zheng , Fan Yin , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Kai-Wei Chang , Minlie Huang , Nanyun Peng

Public LLMs such as the Llama 2-Chat underwent alignment training and were considered safe. Recently Qi et al. [2024] reported that even benign fine-tuning on seemingly safe datasets can give rise to unsafe behaviors in the models. The…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-20 Kaifeng Lyu , Haoyu Zhao , Xinran Gu , Dingli Yu , Anirudh Goyal , Sanjeev Arora

The past year has seen rapid acceleration in the development of large language models (LLMs). However, without proper steering and safeguards, LLMs will readily follow malicious instructions, provide unsafe advice, and generate toxic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-19 Bertie Vidgen , Nino Scherrer , Hannah Rose Kirk , Rebecca Qian , Anand Kannappan , Scott A. Hale , Paul Röttger

Safety lies at the core of developing and deploying large language models (LLMs). However, previous safety benchmarks only concern the safety in one language, e.g. the majority language in the pretraining data such as English. In this work,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Wenxuan Wang , Zhaopeng Tu , Chang Chen , Youliang Yuan , Jen-tse Huang , Wenxiang Jiao , Michael R. Lyu

As Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate increasing capabilities across real-world applications such as code generation and chatbot assistance, ensuring their safety has become paramount. Unlike traditional Large Language Models (LLMs),…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Peiyuan Tang , Haojie Xin , Xiaodong Zhang , Jun Sun , Qin Xia , Zijiang Yang

Large language model (LLM) systems increasingly power everyday AI applications such as chatbots, computer-use assistants, and autonomous robots, where performance often depends on manually well-crafted prompts. LLM-based prompt optimizers…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Andrew Zhao , Reshmi Ghosh , Vitor Carvalho , Emily Lawton , Keegan Hines , Gao Huang , Jack W. Stokes

With the rapid popularity of large language models such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, a growing amount of attention is paid to their safety concerns. These models may generate insulting and discriminatory content, reflect incorrect social values,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-21 Hao Sun , Zhexin Zhang , Jiawen Deng , Jiale Cheng , Minlie Huang

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit weaknesses in traditional safety alignment, which often relies on rigid refusal heuristics or representation engineering to block harmful outputs. While they are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yuyou Zhang , Miao Li , William Han , Yihang Yao , Zhepeng Cen , Ding Zhao

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Samyak Jain , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kemal Oksuz , Tom Joy , Philip H. S. Torr , Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K. Dokania

Instruction fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) is a powerful method for improving task-specific performance, but it can inadvertently lead to a phenomenon where models generate harmful responses when faced with malicious prompts.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Satya Swaroop Gudipudi , Sreeram Vipparla , Harpreet Singh , Shashwat Goel , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru