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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

While there has been progress towards aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and ensuring safe behaviour at inference time, safety guards can easily be removed when fine tuned on unsafe and harmful datasets. While this…

Alignment in large language models (LLMs) is used to enforce guidelines such as safety. Yet, alignment fails in the face of jailbreak attacks that modify inputs to induce unsafe outputs. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Jean-Charles Noirot Ferrand , Yohan Beugin , Eric Pauley , Ryan Sheatsley , Patrick McDaniel

AI developers often apply safety alignment procedures to prevent the misuse of their AI systems. For example, before Meta released Llama 2-Chat - a collection of instruction fine-tuned large language models - they invested heavily in safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Simon Lermen , Charlie Rogers-Smith , Jeffrey Ladish

The emergence of finetuning-as-a-service has revealed a new vulnerability in large language models (LLMs). A mere handful of malicious data uploaded by users can subtly manipulate the finetuning process, resulting in an alignment-broken…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Xin Yi , Shunfan Zheng , Linlin Wang , Gerard de Melo , Xiaoling Wang , Liang He

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in decision-making contexts, but when they present answers without signaling low confidence, users may unknowingly act on erroneous outputs. Prior work shows that LLMs maintain internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Mark Steyvers , Catarina Belem , Padhraic Smyth

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has been a critical concern requiring precise assessment. Current benchmarks primarily concentrate on single-turn dialogues or a single jailbreak attack method…

Large Language Models (LLMs) with safe-alignment training are powerful instruments with robust language comprehension capabilities. These models typically undergo meticulous alignment procedures involving human feedback to ensure the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Maithili Joshi , Palash Nandi , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Black-box finetuning is an emerging interface for adapting state-of-the-art language models to user needs. However, such access may also let malicious actors undermine model safety. To demonstrate the challenge of defending finetuning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Danny Halawi , Alexander Wei , Eric Wallace , Tony T. Wang , Nika Haghtalab , Jacob Steinhardt

The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) raises concerns about the potential harmfulness of their responses. In this paper, we first investigate the harmfulness of responses from four general-purpose LLMs. Next, we propose…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Giordano d'Aloisio , David Williams , Giusy Annunziata , Zhiwei Fei , Antinisca Di Marco , Federica Sarro

Fine-tuning on task-specific data to boost downstream performance is a crucial step for leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). However, previous studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning the models on several adversarial samples or even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Han Shen , Pin-Yu Chen , Payel Das , Tianyi Chen

Safety for Large Language Models (LLMs) has been an ongoing research focus since their emergence and is even more relevant nowadays with the increasing capacity of those models. Currently, there are several guardrails in place for all…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-25 Eduard Stefan Dinuta , Iustin Sirbu , Traian Rebedea

Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data. Prior work shows that introducing a small…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Guoli Wang , Haonan Shi , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

The safety mechanisms of large language models (LLMs) exhibit notable fragility, as even fine-tuning on datasets without harmful content may still undermine their safety capabilities. Meanwhile, existing safety alignment methods…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Guanghao Zhou , Panjia Qiu , Cen Chen , Hongyu Li , Mingyuan Chu , Xin Zhang , Jun Zhou

Despite the general capabilities of Large Language Models (LLM), these models still request fine-tuning or adaptation with customized data when meeting specific business demands. However, this process inevitably introduces new threats,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Jiongxiao Wang , Jiazhao Li , Yiquan Li , Xiangyu Qi , Junjie Hu , Yixuan Li , Patrick McDaniel , Muhao Chen , Bo Li , Chaowei Xiao

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in intelligent systems that perform reasoning, summarization, and code generation. Their ability to follow natural-language instructions, while powerful, also makes them vulnerable to a new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Daniyal Ganiuly , Assel Smaiyl

Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned with human feedback have recently garnered significant attention. However, it remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to induce harmful outputs. Exploring jailbreak…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Hongyi Li , Jiawei Ye , Jie Wu , Tianjie Yan , Chu Wang , Zhixin Li

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, their enhanced reasoning capabilities do not necessarily translate to improved safety performance-and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhexin Zhang , Xian Qi Loye , Victor Shea-Jay Huang , Junxiao Yang , Qi Zhu , Shiyao Cui , Fei Mi , Lifeng Shang , Yingkang Wang , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to automate software engineering tasks, including the generation of UML class diagrams from natural language descriptions. While prior work demonstrates that LLMs can produce…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Rabia Iftikhar , Andreas Rausch

Large language models (LLMs) can still be jailbroken into producing harmful outputs despite safety alignment. Existing attacks show this vulnerability, but not the internal mechanisms that cause it. This study asks whether jailbreak success…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Nilanjana Das , Manas Gaur
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