Related papers: Cannot or Should Not? Automatic Analysis of Refusa…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various tasks but often fail to handle queries that exceed their knowledge and capabilities, leading to incorrect or fabricated responses. This paper addresses the need for…

This study reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing aligned LLMs predominantly respond to unsafe queries with refusals, which often begin with a fixed set of prefixes…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across sectors, yet their alignment with International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is not well understood. This study evaluates eight leading LLMs on their ability to refuse prompts that explicitly…

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…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) are being rapidly integrated into decision-support tools, automation workflows, and AI-enabled software systems. However, their behavior in production environments remains poorly understood, and their failure…

Large Language Models (LLMs) require careful safety alignment to prevent malicious outputs. While significant research focuses on mitigating harmful content generation, the enhanced safety often come with the side effect of over-refusal,…

Evaluating aligned large language models' (LLMs) ability to recognize and reject unsafe user requests is crucial for safe, policy-compliant deployments. Existing evaluation efforts, however, face three limitations that we address with…

A key component of building safe and reliable language models is enabling the models to appropriately refuse to follow certain instructions or answer certain questions. We may want models to output refusal messages for various categories of…

Using AI to create autonomous researchers has the potential to accelerate scientific discovery. A prerequisite for this vision is understanding how well an AI model can identify the underlying structure of a black-box system from its…

Large Language Models (LLMs) should refuse to answer questions beyond their knowledge. This capability, which we term knowledge-aware refusal, is crucial for factual reliability, while existing metrics fail to capture this ability. In this…

Refusal mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring safety. Recent research has revealed that refusal behavior can be mediated by a single direction in activation space, enabling targeted interventions to bypass…

Existing large language models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Two main approaches have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations: retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs)…

The ability of large language models (LLMs) to follow user instructions is central to their reliability, safety, and usefulness. While prior studies assess instruction adherence in the model's main responses, we argue that it is also…

Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (RAIT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to refuse to answer unknown questions. By modifying responses of unknown questions in the training data to refusal responses such as "I don't know", RAIT enhances…

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous domains with their impressive performance but still face their challenges. A predominant issue is the propensity for these models to generate non-existent facts, a concern termed…

While large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been applied to hate speech detoxification, the prompts often trigger safety alerts, causing LLMs to refuse the task. In this study, we systematically investigate false refusal behavior…

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on diverse tasks but often exhibit cognitive inertia, struggling to follow instructions that conflict with the standardized patterns learned during supervised fine-tuning (SFT). To…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is primarily evaluated under open-ended generation, where models can mitigate risk by refusing to respond. In contrast, many real-world applications place LLMs in structured decision-making…

Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction-tuned models, Gemma-2-2B-IT and…