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Related papers: Think Before Refusal : Triggering Safety Reflectio…

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Tool-augmented large language models (LLMs) are usually trained with supervised imitation or coarse-grained reinforcement learning that optimizes single tool calls. Current self-reflection practices rely on heuristic prompts or one-way…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Junhao Su , Yuanliang Wan , Junwei Yang , Hengyu Shi , Tianyang Han , Junfeng Luo , Yurui Qiu

Conversational large language models are fine-tuned for both instruction-following and safety, resulting in models that obey benign requests but refuse harmful ones. While this refusal behavior is widespread across chat models, its…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Andy Arditi , Oscar Obeso , Aaquib Syed , Daniel Paleka , Nina Panickssery , Wes Gurnee , Neel Nanda

Reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning transforms large language models while creating a vulnerability we experimentally verify: Our experiment shows that malicious RL fine-tuning dismantles safety guardrails with remarkable efficiency,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-08 Wenjun Cao

Safety alignment of large language models currently faces a central challenge: existing alignment techniques often prioritize mitigating responses to harmful prompts at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly…

Long-context LLMs can infer objectives that are not stated explicitly. This capability is useful for reasoning over documents, code, retrieved evidence, and tool traces, but it also creates a safety risk: harmful intent can be distributed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yu Fu , Haz Sameen Shahgir , Huanli Gong , Zhipeng Wei , N. Benjamin Erichson , Yue Dong

Large language models (LLMs) have been routinely used to solve various tasks using step-by-step reasoning. However, the structure of intermediate reasoning steps, or thoughts, is rigid and unidirectional, such as chains, trees, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Sijia Chen , Baochun Li

We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models (RLMs), which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically, after benign reasoning training on math or code domains, RLMs will use multiple…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Zheng-Xin Yong , Stephen H. Bach

Large language models (LLMs) can be dishonest when reporting on their actions and beliefs -- for example, they may overstate their confidence in factual claims or cover up evidence of covert actions. Such dishonesty may arise due to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Manas Joglekar , Jeremy Chen , Gabriel Wu , Jason Yosinski , Jasmine Wang , Boaz Barak , Amelia Glaese

This work introduces a novel framework for evaluating LLMs' capacity to balance instruction-following with critical reasoning when presented with multiple-choice questions containing no valid answers. Through systematic evaluation across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gracjan Góral , Emilia Wiśnios , Piotr Sankowski , Paweł Budzianowski

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yuheng Chen , Zhiyu Wu , Bowen Cheng , Tetsuro Takahashi

As the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, the importance of rigorous safety evaluation is becoming increasingly evident. Recent concerns within the realm of safety assessment have highlighted instances in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Tatsuhiro Aoshima , Mitsuaki Akiyama

Safety backdoor attacks in large language models (LLMs) enable the stealthy triggering of unsafe behaviors while evading detection during normal interactions. The high dimensionality of potential triggers in the token space and the diverse…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Yi Zeng , Weiyu Sun , Tran Ngoc Huynh , Dawn Song , Bo Li , Ruoxi Jia

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant advancements in performance, various jailbreak attacks have posed growing safety and ethical risks. Malicious users often exploit adversarial context to deceive LLMs, prompting them…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Jinhwa Kim , Ian G. Harris

Jailbreak attacks pose a serious threat to the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) by crafting adversarial prompts that bypass alignment mechanisms, causing the models to produce harmful, restricted, or biased content. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Xiangman Li , Xiaodong Wu , Qi Li , Jianbing Ni , Rongxing Lu

In this study, we investigated the effects of self-reflection in large language models (LLMs) on problem-solving performance. We instructed nine popular LLMs to answer a series of multiple-choice questions to provide a performance baseline.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Matthew Renze , Erhan Guven

We study how to perform unlearning, i.e. forgetting undesirable misbehaviors, on large language models (LLMs). We show at least three scenarios of aligning LLMs with human preferences can benefit from unlearning: (1) removing harmful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Yuanshun Yao , Xiaojun Xu , Yang Liu

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Samyak Jain , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kemal Oksuz , Tom Joy , Philip H. S. Torr , Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K. Dokania

Large language models (LLMs) have seen significant advancements, achieving superior performance in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, from understanding to reasoning. However, they remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-28 Chen Chen , Yuchen Sun , Xueluan Gong , Jiaxin Gao , Kwok-Yan Lam

Hallucination in large language models (LLMs) has been widely studied in recent years, with progress in both detection and mitigation aimed at improving truthfulness. Yet, a critical side effect remains largely overlooked: enhancing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Omar Mahmoud , Ali Khalil , Buddhika Laknath Semage , Thommen George Karimpanal , Santu Rana

Safety alignment is an important procedure before the official deployment of a Large Language Model (LLM). While safety alignment has been extensively studied for LLM, there is still a large research gap for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs)…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Tiansheng Huang , Sihao Hu , Fatih Ilhan , Selim Furkan Tekin , Zachary Yahn , Yichang Xu , Ling Liu