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Large language models (LLMs), known for their capability in understanding and following instructions, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Researchers have found that current commercial LLMs either fail to be "harmless" by presenting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Bocheng Chen , Advait Paliwal , Qiben Yan

When given the option, will LLMs choose to leave the conversation (bail)? We investigate this question by giving models the option to bail out of interactions using three different bail methods: a bail tool the model can call, a bail string…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Danielle Ensign , Henry Sleight , Kyle Fish

Chat-based language models are designed to be helpful, yet they should not comply with every user request. While most existing work primarily focuses on refusal of "unsafe" queries, we posit that the scope of noncompliance should be…

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives and personalized. However, LLM personalization might also increase unintended side effects. Recent work suggests that persona prompting can lead models to falsely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco , Paul Röttger , Nino Scherrer , Emanuele Borgonovo , Elmar Plischke , Dirk Hovy

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a range of vulnerabilities that allow malicious users to solicit undesirable responses through manipulation of the input text. These so-called jailbreak prompts are designed to trick the LLM into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 John Hawkins , Aditya Pramar , Rodney Beard , Rohitash Chandra

Because state-of-the-art language models are expensive to train, most practitioners must make use of one of the few publicly available language models or language model APIs. This consolidation of trust increases the potency of backdoor…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-07-28 Nikhil Kandpal , Matthew Jagielski , Florian Tramèr , Nicholas Carlini

Large language model (LLM) safety is a critical issue, with numerous studies employing red team testing to enhance model security. Among these, jailbreak methods explore potential vulnerabilities by crafting malicious prompts that induce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Honglin Mu , Han He , Yuxin Zhou , Yunlong Feng , Yang Xu , Libo Qin , Xiaoming Shi , Zeming Liu , Xudong Han , Qi Shi , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

This study addresses a critical gap in safety tuning practices for Large Language Models (LLMs) by identifying and tackling a refusal position bias within safety tuning data, which compromises the models' ability to appropriately refuse…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Youliang Yuan , Wenxiang Jiao , Wenxuan Wang , Jen-tse Huang , Jiahao Xu , Tian Liang , Pinjia He , Zhaopeng Tu

Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vulnerable to adversarial misuse. While prior work has shown that safety-relevant features are encoded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sadia Asif , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), refusal mechanisms have become a critical component for ensuring responsible and safe model behavior. However, existing refusal strategies are largely \textit{one-size-fits-all}…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jiaxi Yang , Shicheng Liu , Yuchen Yang , Dongwon Lee

We localize the policy routing mechanism in alignment-trained language models. An intermediate-layer attention gate reads detected content and triggers deeper amplifier heads that boost the signal toward refusal. In smaller models the gate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Gregory N. Frank

Despite the outstanding performance of Large language Models (LLMs) in diverse tasks, they are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, wherein adversarial prompts are crafted to bypass their security mechanisms and elicit unexpected responses.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-25 Zeqing He , Zhibo Wang , Zhixuan Chu , Huiyu Xu , Wenhui Zhang , Qinglong Wang , Rui Zheng

Integrated Speech and Large Language Models (SLMs) that can follow speech instructions and generate relevant text responses have gained popularity lately. However, the safety and robustness of these models remains largely unclear. In this…

Recently, language models like Llama 3.1 Instruct have become increasingly capable of agentic behavior, enabling them to perform tasks requiring short-term planning and tool use. In this study, we apply refusal-vector ablation to Llama 3.1…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Simon Lermen , Mateusz Dziemian , Govind Pimpale

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

Refusal discovery is the task of identifying the full set of topics that a language model refuses to discuss. We introduce this new problem setting and develop a refusal discovery method, Iterated Prefill Crawler (IPC), that uses token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Can Rager , Chris Wendler , Rohit Gandikota , David Bau

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

An important aspect in developing language models that interact with humans is aligning their behavior to be useful and unharmful for their human users. This is usually achieved by tuning the model in a way that enhances desired behaviors…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Yotam Wolf , Noam Wies , Oshri Avnery , Yoav Levine , Amnon Shashua

Current safety evaluations of language models rely on benchmark-based assessments that may miss localized vulnerabilities. We present RepIt, a simple and data-efficient framework for isolating concept-specific representations in LM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Vincent Siu , Nathan W. Henry , Nicholas Crispino , Yang Liu , Dawn Song , Chenguang Wang
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