Related papers: Think Before Refusal : Triggering Safety Reflectio…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) extend large language models by generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, significantly improving mathematical and logical problem solving. However, this explicit reasoning process also introduces…
Large language models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning have achieved strong performance across diverse tasks, including mathematics, coding, and general reasoning. A distinctive ability of these reasoning models is…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that progressive refinement, rather than providing a single answer, results in more accurate and thoughtful outputs. However, existing methods often rely heavily on…
Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models (LLMs). Current safety alignment methods have attempted to address these issues, but they experience two significant limitations: insufficient safety alignment depth and…
Refusal is a key safety behavior in aligned language models, yet the internal mechanisms driving refusals remain opaque. In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study of refusal in instruction-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders to identify…
Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on complex reasoning tasks using techniques such as chain-of-thought and self-consistency. However, ensemble-based approaches, especially self-consistency which relies on…
In order to be deployed safely, Large Language Models (LLMs) must be capable of dynamically adapting their behavior based on their level of knowledge and uncertainty associated with specific topics. This adaptive behavior, which we refer to…
LLMs are trained to refuse harmful instructions, but do they truly understand harmfulness beyond just refusing? Prior work has shown that LLMs' refusal behaviors can be mediated by a one-dimensional subspace, i.e., a refusal direction. In…
Open-weight LLMs can be modified at inference time with simple activation edits, which raises a practical question for safety: do common safety interventions like refusal training or metatag training survive such edits? We study model…
Reinforcement learning based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) on human preferences has been shown to enhance both their capabilities and safety behavior. However, in cases related to safety, without precise instructions to human…
Large language models (LLMs) aligned for safety often suffer from over-refusal, the tendency to reject seemingly toxic or benign prompts by misclassifying them as toxic. This behavior undermines models' helpfulness and restricts usability…
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…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have become the cornerstone of today's generative AI ecosystem, sparking intense competition among tech giants and startups. In particular, an MLLM generates a text response given a prompt consisting…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they remain susceptible to sophisticated, multi-step jailbreak attacks that circumvent conventional surface-level safety alignment by exploiting the internal generation…
Self-reflection -- the ability of a large language model (LLM) to revisit, evaluate, and revise its own reasoning -- has recently emerged as a powerful behavior enabled by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). While…
Training a language model to be both helpful and harmless requires careful calibration of refusal behaviours: Models should refuse to follow malicious instructions or give harmful advice (e.g."how do I kill someone?"), but they should not…
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…
Safety-aligned language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet refusal behavior can be suppressed by steering their internal representations. Existing methods do so by ablating a refusal direction from model activations, aiming…
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of Large Language Models' (LLMs) behavior on long-tail distributed (encrypted) texts and their safety implications. We introduce a two-dimensional framework for assessing LLM safety: (1)…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, especially in high-stakes settings, it becomes vital to know when the output of an LLM…