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Inference-time LLM alignment methods, particularly activation steering, offer an alternative to fine-tuning by directly modifying activations during generation. Existing methods, however, often rely on non-anticipative interventions that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Julian Skifstad , Xinyue Annie Yang , Glen Chou

While a lot of recent research focuses on enhancing the textual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing the multi-agent framework or reasoning chains, several benchmark tasks can be solved with 100\% success…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Yongchao Chen , Harsh Jhamtani , Srinagesh Sharma , Chuchu Fan , Chi Wang

Safety-aligned LLMs suffer from two failure modes: jailbreak (answering harmful inputs) and over-refusal (declining benign queries). Existing vector steering methods adjust the magnitude of answer vectors, but this creates a fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haonan Zhang , Dongxia Wang , Yi Liu , Kexin Chen , Wenhai Wang

Recent work in activation steering has demonstrated the potential to better control the outputs of Large Language Models (LLMs), but it involves finding steering vectors. This is difficult because engineers do not typically know how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-08 Ole Jorgensen , Dylan Cope , Nandi Schoots , Murray Shanahan

Conversational large language models are trained to refuse to answer harmful questions. However, emergent jailbreaking techniques can still elicit unsafe outputs, presenting an ongoing challenge for model alignment. To better understand how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Sarah Ball , Frauke Kreuter , Nina Panickssery

Deploying LLMs in multi-turn dialogues facilitates jailbreak attacks that distribute harmful intent across seemingly benign turns. Recent training-based multi-turn jailbreak methods learn long-horizon attack strategies from interaction…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Zhida He , Xiaoyu Wen , Han Qi , Ziyuan Zhou , Peng Yu , Xingcheng Xu , Dongrui Liu , Xia Hu , Chaochao Lu , Qiaosheng Zhang

In the rapidly advancing field of artificial intelligence, the concept of Red-Teaming or Jailbreaking large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a crucial area of study. This approach is especially significant in terms of assessing and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-17 Rima Hazra , Sayan Layek , Somnath Banerjee , Soujanya Poria

Jailbreaking in Large Language Models (LLMs) threatens their safe use in sensitive domains like education by allowing users to bypass ethical safeguards. This study focuses on detecting jailbreaks in 2-Sigma, a clinical education platform…

Steering language models (LMs) by modifying internal activations is a popular approach for controlling text generation. Unsupervised dictionary learning methods, e.g., sparse autoencoders, can be scaled to produce many steering vectors, but…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Jiuding Sun , Sidharth Baskaran , Zhengxuan Wu , Michael Sklar , Christopher Potts , Atticus Geiger

Safety mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) remain predominantly English-centric, creating systematic vulnerabilities in multilingual deployment. Prior work shows that translating malicious prompts into other languages can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Shirin Alanova , Bogdan Minko , Sabrina Sadiekh , Evgeniy Kokuykin

Applying steering vectors to large language models (LLMs) is an efficient and effective model alignment technique, but we lack an interpretable explanation for how it works-- specifically, what internal mechanisms steering vectors affect…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Stephen Cheng , Sarah Wiegreffe , Dinesh Manocha

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain susceptible to jailbreak exploits that bypass safety filters and induce harmful or unethical behavior. This work presents a systematic taxonomy of existing jailbreak defenses across prompt-level,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Ryan Wong , Hosea David Yu Fei Ng , Dhananjai Sharma , Glenn Jun Jie Ng , Kavishvaran Srinivasan

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been extensively used across diverse domains, including virtual assistants, automated code generation, and scientific research. However, they remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, which manipulate the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Haoran Gu , Handing Wang , Yi Mei , Mengjie Zhang , Yaochu Jin

As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their ability to refuse malicious prompts, especially jailbreak attacks, is essential for safe and reliable use. Recently, activation steering has emerged as an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Leheng Sheng , Changshuo Shen , Weixiang Zhao , Junfeng Fang , Xiaohao Liu , Zhenkai Liang , Xiang Wang , An Zhang , Tat-Seng Chua

We introduce Mechanistic Error Reduction with Abstention (MERA), a principled framework for steering language models (LMs) to mitigate errors through selective, adaptive interventions. Unlike existing methods that rely on fixed, manually…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Anna Hedström , Salim I. Amoukou , Tom Bewley , Saumitra Mishra , Manuela Veloso

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely integrated into interactive systems such as dialogue agents and task-oriented assistants. This growing ecosystem also raises supply-chain risks, where adversaries can distribute poisoned models that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yiyang Lu , Jinwen He , Yue Zhao , Kai Chen , Ruigang Liang , Cheng Hong , Yingjun Zhang

The memorization of training data by Large Language Models (LLMs) poses significant risks, including privacy leaks and the regurgitation of copyrighted content. Activation steering, a technique that directly intervenes in model activations,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Manan Suri , Nishit Anand , Amisha Bhaskar

Vision-language models (VLMs) have become central to tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning, and text-to-image generation. However, their outputs are highly sensitive to prompt variations, which can reveal vulnerabilities…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Aarush Noheria , Yuguang Yao

While autoregressive speech token generation models produce speech with remarkable variety and naturalness, their inherent lack of controllability often results in issues such as hallucinations and undesired vocalizations that do not…

Ensuring the safety and harmlessness of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become equally critical as their performance in applications. However, existing safety alignment methods typically suffer from safety-performance trade-offs and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Yichi Zhang , Siyuan Zhang , Yao Huang , Zeyu Xia , Zhengwei Fang , Xiao Yang , Ranjie Duan , Dong Yan , Yinpeng Dong , Jun Zhu