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Related papers: Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single…

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Language models are trained to follow instructions, but they are also powerful pattern completers. What happens when these two objectives conflict? We construct conversations in which a user instruction to behave in a target way T (e.g.,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Carolina Camassa , Derek Shiller

Recent researches have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to a security threat known as Backdoor Attack. The backdoored model will behave well in normal cases but exhibit malicious behaviours on inputs inserted with a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Yunzhuo Hao , Wenkai Yang , Yankai Lin

Large language models deployed as agents increasingly interact with external systems through tool calls--actions with real-world consequences that text outputs alone do not carry. Safety evaluations, however, overwhelmingly measure…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Arnold Cartagena , Ariane Teixeira

Long-context LLMs can infer objectives that are not stated explicitly. This capability is useful for reasoning over documents, code, retrieved evidence, and tool traces, but it also creates a safety risk: harmful intent can be distributed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yu Fu , Haz Sameen Shahgir , Huanli Gong , Zhipeng Wei , N. Benjamin Erichson , Yue Dong

Large language models (LLMs) enforce safety alignment to reliably refuse malicious requests, yet the same blanket safeguards also block legitimate uses in policing, defense, and other high-stakes settings. Earlier "refusal-direction" edits…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Xin Tong , Zhi Lin , Jingya Wang , Meng Han , Bo Jin

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at multimodal perception and understanding, yet their tendency to generate hallucinated or inaccurate responses undermines their trustworthiness. Existing methods have largely overlooked the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Yuhao Wang , Zhiyuan Zhu , Heyang Liu , Yusheng Liao , Hongcheng Liu , Yanfeng Wang , Yu Wang

The evaluation of large language model refusal on malicious-coding tasks now spans at least thirteen publicly released prompt corpora (AdvBench, the CyberSecEval family, RMCBench, RedCode, MCGMark, JailbreakBench, CySecBench, MalwareBench,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Richard J. Young , Gregory D. Moody

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

Despite investments in improving model safety, studies show that misaligned capabilities remain latent in safety-tuned models. In this work, we shed light on the mechanics of this phenomenon. First, we show that even when model generations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Asma Ghandeharioun , Ann Yuan , Marius Guerard , Emily Reif , Michael A. Lepori , Lucas Dixon

Recent work has shown that language models' refusal behavior is primarily encoded in a single direction in their latent space, making it vulnerable to targeted attacks. Although Latent Adversarial Training (LAT) attempts to improve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Alexandra Abbas , Nora Petrova , Helios Ael Lyons , Natalia Perez-Campanero

Open-weight language models can be rendered unsafe through several distinct interventions, but the resulting models may differ substantially in capabilities, behavioral profile, and internal failure mode. We study behavioral and mechanistic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Md Rysul Kabir , Zoran Tiganj

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Fu-Chieh Chang , Yu-Ting Lee , Pei-Yuan Wu

Continual unlearning poses the challenge of enabling large vision-language models to selectively refuse specific image-instruction pairs in response to sequential deletion requests, while preserving general utility. However, sequential…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Hyundong Jin , Dongyoon Han , Eunwoo Kim

Most commonly used language models (LMs) are instruction-tuned and aligned using a combination of fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, causing them to refuse users requests deemed harmful by the model. However, jailbreak prompts can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Aryan Shrivastava , Ari Holtzman

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

Most jailbreak techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily rely on prompt modifications, including paraphrasing, obfuscation, or conversational strategies. Meanwhile, abliteration techniques (also known as targeted ablations of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Maël Jenny , Jérémie Dentan , Sonia Vanier , Michaël Krajecki

Traditional white-box methods for creating adversarial perturbations against LLMs typically rely only on gradient computation from the targeted model, ignoring the internal mechanisms responsible for attack success or failure. Conversely,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-07 Thomas Winninger , Boussad Addad , Katarzyna Kapusta

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress, yet their safety alignment remains limited. Typically, current open-source MLLMs rely on the alignment inherited from their language module to avoid harmful…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yanbo Wang , Jiyang Guan , Jian Liang , Ran He

As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly capable, maintaining a balance between safety and usefulness remains a central challenge. Safety mechanisms, while essential, can backfire, causing over-refusal, where models decline…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Kaixuan Ren , Preslav Nakov , Usman Naseem

Safety alignment is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to resist malicious instructions but often results in over-refusals, where benign prompts are unnecessarily rejected, impairing user experience and model utility. We introduce…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Mahavir Dabas , Si Chen , Charles Fleming , Ming Jin , Ruoxi Jia