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While large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with human values, their generations may still violate safety constraints. A growing line of work addresses this problem by modifying the model's sampling policy at decoding time using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Bat-Sheva Einbinder , Hen Davidov , Yee Whye Teh , Yarin Gal , Yaniv Romano

Zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer enables a multilingual pretrained language model, finetuned on a task in one language, make predictions for this task in other languages. While being broadly studied for natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Nadezhda Chirkova , Vassilina Nikoulina

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at various natural language processing tasks but remain vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks that induce harmful content generation. In this paper, we reveal a critical safety inconsistency: LLMs can more…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Peng Ding , Wen Sun , Dailin Li , Wei Zou , Jiaming Wang , Jiajun Chen , Shujian Huang

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

While text-to-image synthesis currently enjoys great popularity among researchers and the general public, the security of these models has been neglected so far. Many text-guided image generation models rely on pre-trained text encoders…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Lukas Struppek , Dominik Hintersdorf , Kristian Kersting

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) remains vulnerable, as their initial behavior can be easily jailbroken by even relatively simple attacks. Since infilling a fixed template between the input instruction and initial model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Chak Tou Leong , Qingyu Yin , Jian Wang , Wenjie Li

This study investigates the generation of unsafe or harmful content in state-of-the-art generative models, focusing on methods for restricting such generations. We introduce a novel training-free approach using attention reweighing to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Shivank Garg , Manyana Tiwari

Generative models are increasingly paired with safety classifiers that filter harmful or undesirable outputs. A common strategy is to fine-tune the generator to reduce the probability of being filtered, but this can be suboptimal: it often…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Sarah Ball , Andreas Haupt

When building Large Language Models (LLMs), it is paramount to bear safety in mind and protect them with guardrails. Indeed, LLMs should never generate content promoting or normalizing harmful, illegal, or unethical behavior that may…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Simone Tedeschi , Felix Friedrich , Patrick Schramowski , Kristian Kersting , Roberto Navigli , Huu Nguyen , Bo Li

This paper proposes a control-based framework for aligning large language models (LLMs) by leveraging a control barrier function (CBF) to ensure user-desirable text generation. The presented framework applies the safety filter, designed…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-03-31 Yuya Miyaoka , Masaki Inoue

Large-scale pre-trained language models have demonstrated strong capabilities of generating realistic text. However, it remains challenging to control the generation results. Previous approaches such as prompting are far from sufficient,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-10 Xu Zou , Da Yin , Qingyang Zhong , Ming Ding , Hongxia Yang , Zhilin Yang , Jie Tang

Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Tsung-Yen Yang , Tingnan Zhang , Linda Luu , Sehoon Ha , Jie Tan , Wenhao Yu

Large language models (LLMs) are pretrained on corpora containing trillions of tokens and, therefore, inevitably memorize sensitive information. Locate-then-edit methods, as a mainstream paradigm of model editing, offer a promising solution…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zhiyu Sun , Minrui Luo , Yu Wang , Zhili Chen , Tianxing He

As large language models (LLMs) become easily accessible nowadays, the trade-off between safety and helpfulness can significantly impact user experience. A model that prioritizes safety will cause users to feel less engaged and assisted…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yi-Lin Tuan , Xilun Chen , Eric Michael Smith , Louis Martin , Soumya Batra , Asli Celikyilmaz , William Yang Wang , Daniel M. Bikel

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has become a standard approach for improving the reliability of large language models (LLMs). Prior work demonstrates the vulnerability of RAG systems by misleading them into generating attacker-chosen…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Yanbo Dai , Zhenlan Ji , Zongjie Li , Kuan Li , Shuai Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their ability to generate coherent and contextually relevant text. However, their deployment raises significant concerns about the potential for generating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Hoang Phan , Victor Li , Qi Lei

Backdoor attacks significantly compromise the security of large language models by triggering them to output specific and controlled content. Currently, triggers for textual backdoor attacks fall into two categories: fixed-token triggers…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Jingyi Zheng , Tianyi Hu , Tianshuo Cong , Xinlei He

The prevalence and strong capability of large language models (LLMs) present significant safety and ethical risks if exploited by malicious users. To prevent the potentially deceptive usage of LLMs, recent works have proposed algorithms to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-20 Zhouxing Shi , Yihan Wang , Fan Yin , Xiangning Chen , Kai-Wei Chang , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training for explicit chain-of-thought (e.g., GRPO) improves the reasoning ability of multimodal large-scale reasoning models (MLRMs). But recent evidence shows that it can simultaneously degrade…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Soumya Suvra Ghosal , Souradip Chakraborty , Vaibhav Singh , Furong Huang , Dinesh Manocha , Amrit Singh Bedi

Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically aligned for safety during the post-training phase; however, they may still generate inappropriate outputs that could potentially pose risks to users. This challenge underscores the need for robust…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Mahesh Kumar Nandwana , Youngwan Lim , Joseph Liu , Alex Yang , Varun Notibala , Nishchaie Khanna