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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}…
Current alignment evaluation mostly measures whether models encode dangerous concepts and whether they refuse harmful requests. Both miss the layer where alignment often operates: routing from concept detection to behavioral policy. We…
Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate refusal responses to harmless queries due to the over-refusal problem. However, existing methods for mitigating over-refusal cannot maintain a low refusal ratio for harmless queries…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive language understanding and generation capabilities, enabling them to answer a wide range of questions across various domains. However, these models are not flawless and often produce…
Mitigating hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) is critical for their reliable deployment. Existing methods typically fine-tune LLMs to abstain from answering questions beyond their knowledge scope. However, these methods often…
Safety-aligned language models often refuse cybersecurity requests whose wording resembles misuse, even when the task is authorized and defensive. This makes security evaluation ambiguous: a failed answer may reflect missing capability or…
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…
Refusal behavior in large language models (LLMs) enables them to decline responding to harmful, unethical, or inappropriate prompts, ensuring alignment with ethical standards. This paper investigates refusal behavior across six LLMs from…
We develop a principled procedure for determining when a large language model (LLM) should abstain from responding (e.g., by saying "I don't know") in a general domain, instead of resorting to possibly "hallucinating" a non-sensical or…
Video generative models achieve high-quality synthesis from natural-language prompts by leveraging large-scale web data. However, this training paradigm inherently exposes them to unsafe biases and harmful concepts, introducing the risk of…
The ability of language models in RAG systems to selectively refuse to answer based on flawed context is critical for safety, yet remains a significant failure point. Our large-scale study reveals that even frontier models struggle in this…
Machine learning models always make a prediction, even when it is likely to be inaccurate. This behavior should be avoided in many decision support applications, where mistakes can have severe consequences. Albeit already studied in 1970,…
Safety-aligned language models refuse harmful requests through learned refusal behaviors encoded in their internal representations. Recent activation-based jailbreaking methods circumvent these safety mechanisms by applying orthogonal…
Safety alignment in language models operates through two mechanistically distinct systems: refusal neurons that gate whether harmful knowledge is expressed, and concept neurons that encode the harmful knowledge itself. By targeting a single…
Safety alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) refuse harmful requests by post-training on harmful queries paired with refusal answers. Although safety alignment is widely adopted in industry, the overrefusal problem…
Ensuring safe and appropriate responses from vision-language models (VLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in high-risk or ambiguous scenarios. We introduce SafeCoT, a lightweight, interpretable framework that leverages…
Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can elicit harmful responses. Defending against such attacks remains challenging due to the opacity of jailbreaking mechanisms and the high computational cost of…
Large language models are meticulously aligned to be both helpful and harmless. However, recent research points to a potential overkill which means models may refuse to answer benign queries. In this paper, we investigate the factors for…
We introduce Refusal Steering, an inference-time method to exercise fine-grained control over Large Language Models refusal behaviour on politically sensitive topics without retraining. We replace fragile pattern-based refusal detection…
Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to obey safe requests while refusing harmful ones. However, traditional refusal mechanisms often lead to "rigid rejection," where a general template (e.g., "I cannot fulfill this…