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Safety alignment has become a critical step to ensure LLMs refuse harmful requests while providing helpful and harmless responses. However, despite the ubiquity of safety alignment for deployed frontier models, two separate lines of recent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-06 John T. Halloran

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. However, this behavior is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Shaan Shah , Raghav Singhal , Praneeth Vepakomma

Current vision large language models (VLLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities yet are prone to generate harmful content and are vulnerable to even the simplest jailbreaking attacks. Our initial analysis finds that this is due to the presence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Yongshuo Zong , Ondrej Bohdal , Tingyang Yu , Yongxin Yang , Timothy Hospedales

Reasoning methods that adaptively allocate test-time compute have advanced LLM performance on easy to verify domains such as math and code. In this work, we study how to utilize this approach to train models that exhibit a degree of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Taeyoun Kim , Fahim Tajwar , Aditi Raghunathan , Aviral Kumar

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved tremendous success with their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet also face safety issues similar to those of basic language models. In particular, while algorithms are designed to guide them to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Zeming Wei , Qiaosheng Zhang , Xia Hu , Xingcheng Xu

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked widespread concerns about their safety. Recent work demonstrates that safety alignment of LLMs can be easily removed by fine-tuning with a few adversarially chosen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Samuele Poppi , Zheng-Xin Yong , Yifei He , Bobbie Chern , Han Zhao , Aobo Yang , Jianfeng Chi

Mechanistic interpretability reveals that safety-critical behaviors (e.g., alignment, jailbreak, backdoor) in Large Language Models (LLMs) are grounded in specialized functional components. However, existing safety attribution methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Miao Yu , Siyuan Fu , Moayad Aloqaily , Zhenhong Zhou , Safa Otoum , Xing fan , Kun Wang , Yufei Guo , Qingsong Wen

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…

Reasoning-based language models have demonstrated strong performance across various domains, with the most notable gains seen in mathematical and coding tasks. Recent research has shown that reasoning also offers significant benefits for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar , Traian Rebedea , Christopher Parisien

Small language models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed on edge devices, making their safety alignment crucial yet challenging. Current shallow alignment methods that rely on direct refusal of malicious queries fail to provide robust…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Haonan Shi , Guoli Wang , Tu Ouyang , An Wang

Large language models (LLMs) show inherent brittleness in their safety mechanisms, as evidenced by their susceptibility to jailbreaking and even non-malicious fine-tuning. This study explores this brittleness of safety alignment by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Boyi Wei , Kaixuan Huang , Yangsibo Huang , Tinghao Xie , Xiangyu Qi , Mengzhou Xia , Prateek Mittal , Mengdi Wang , Peter Henderson

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zhiyu Xue , Zimo Qi , Guangliang Liu , Bocheng Chen , Ramtin Pedarsani

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning and text generation. However, these models can inadvertently generate unsafe or biased responses when prompted with problematic inputs, raising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Avinash Amballa , Durga Sandeep Saluru , Gayathri Akkinapalli , Abhishek Sureddy , Akshay Kumar Sureddy

LLM alignment ensures that large language models behave safely and effectively by aligning their outputs with human values, goals, and intentions. Aligning LLMs employ huge amounts of data, computation, and time. Moreover, curating data…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Amrit Khera , Rajat Ghosh , Debojyoti Dutta

Safety alignment for large language models (LLMs) aims to reduce harmful or unsafe behavior while preserving general utility. However, recent findings reveal that alignment effects can be fragile: lightweight post-alignment manipulations,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zhihao Liu , Yifan Wu , Jian Lou , Di Wang , Yuxi Zhou , Yuke Hu

Despite the intrinsic risk-awareness of Large Language Models (LLMs), current defenses often result in shallow safety alignment, rendering models vulnerable to disguised attacks (e.g., prefilling) while degrading utility. To bridge this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Xianya Fang , Xianying Luo , Yadong Wang , Xiang Chen , Yu Tian , Zequn Sun , Rui Liu , Jun Fang , Naiqiang Tan , Yuanning Cui , Sheng-Jun Huang

Large language models (LLMs) possess strong semantic understanding, driving significant progress in data mining applications. This is further enhanced by large reasoning models (LRMs), which provide explicit multi-step reasoning traces. On…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Aobo Chen , Chenxu Zhao , Chenglin Miao , Mengdi Huai

The progress of AI systems such as large language models (LLMs) raises increasingly pressing concerns about their safe deployment. This paper examines the value alignment problem for LLMs, arguing that current alignment strategies are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Raphaël Millière

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs are typically safety-aligned before release to prevent harmful content generation. However, recent studies show that safety behaviors are concentrated in a small subset of parameters, making…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Zhaoxin Wang , Jiaming Liang , Fengbin Zhu , Weixiang Zhao , Junfeng Fang , Jiayi Ji , Handing Wang , Tat-Seng Chua

Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) enable test-time scaling, with dataset-level accuracy improving as the token budget increases, motivating adaptive reasoning -- spending tokens when they improve reliability and stopping early when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Xi Wang , Anushri Suresh , Alvin Zhang , Rishi More , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Daniel Khashabi , Eric Nalisnick