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Related papers: Think Before Refusal : Triggering Safety Reflectio…

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Extensive work has been devoted to improving the safety mechanism of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, LLMs still tend to generate harmful responses when faced with malicious instructions, a phenomenon referred to as "Jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Ming Ma , Yuhan Chen , Bing Qin

We identify a structural weakness in current large language model (LLM) alignment: modern refusal mechanisms are fail-open. While existing approaches encode refusal behaviors across multiple latent features, suppressing a single dominant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Zachary Coalson , Beth Sohler , Aiden Gabriel , Sanghyun Hong

Large language models (LLMs) are vital for a wide range of applications yet remain susceptible to jailbreak threats, which could lead to the generation of inappropriate responses. Conventional defenses, such as refusal and adversarial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Xianglin Yang , Gelei Deng , Jieming Shi , Tianwei Zhang , Jin Song Dong

Large language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, but can they accurately predict when they will refuse before responding? We investigate this question through a systematic study where models first predict their refusal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Tanay Gondil

Large Reasoning Models possess remarkable capabilities for self-correction in general domain; however, they frequently struggle to recover from unsafe reasoning trajectories under adversarial attacks. Existing alignment methods attempt to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Dongcheng Zhang , Yi Zhang , Yuxin Chen , An Zhang , Xiang Wang , Chaochao Lu

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shifted the post-training paradigm from traditional instruction tuning and human preference alignment toward reinforcement learning (RL) focused on reasoning capabilities. However,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Qianxi He , Qingyu Ren , Shanzhe Lei , Xuhong Wang , Yingchun Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate erroneous outputs, known as hallucinations, due to their limitations in discerning questions beyond their knowledge scope. While addressing hallucination has been a focal point in research,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Hongshen Xu , Zichen Zhu , Situo Zhang , Da Ma , Shuai Fan , Lu Chen , Kai Yu

LLM-based Automatic Prompt Optimization, which typically utilizes LLMs as Prompt Optimizers to self-reflect and refine prompts, has shown promising performance in recent studies. Despite the success, the underlying mechanism of this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-06 Ruotian Ma , Xiaolei Wang , Xin Zhou , Jian Li , Nan Du , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Generative AI, including large language models (LLMs) have the potential -- and already are being used -- to increase the speed, scale, and types of unsafe conversations online. LLMs lower the barrier for entry for bad actors to create…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Owen Hoffman , Kangze Peng , Zehua You , Sajid Kamal , Sukrit Venkatagiri

Despite extensive safety-tuning, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks via adversarially crafted instructions, reflecting a persistent trade-off between safety and task performance. In this work, we propose…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Wei Jie Yeo , Ranjan Satapathy , Erik Cambria

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Hanning Zhang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Yi R. Fung , Qing Lian , Xingyao Wang , Yangyi Chen , Heng Ji , Tong Zhang

Refusal refers to the functional behavior enabling safety-aligned language models to reject harmful or unethical prompts. Following the growing scientific interest in mechanistic interpretability, recent work encoded refusal behavior as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Giorgio Piras , Raffaele Mura , Fabio Brau , Luca Oneto , Fabio Roli , Battista Biggio

As the influence of large language models (LLMs) spans across global communities, their safety challenges in multilingual settings become paramount for alignment research. This paper examines the variations in safety challenges faced by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Lingfeng Shen , Weiting Tan , Sihao Chen , Yunmo Chen , Jingyu Zhang , Haoran Xu , Boyuan Zheng , Philipp Koehn , Daniel Khashabi

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on medical question answering (medical QA), and chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has further improved results by eliciting explicit intermediate reasoning; meanwhile,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Zaifu Zhan , Mengyuan Cui , Rui Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in diverse real-world settings, yet remain vulnerable to jailbreaking, where prompt-based attacks bypass safety filters. We present THREAT (Targeted Harmful generation via Reframing and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Shahnewaz Karim Sakib , Swati Kar , Anindya Bijoy Das

While large language models (LLMs) are proficient at question-answering (QA), it is not always clear how (or even if) an answer follows from their latent "beliefs". This lack of interpretability is a growing impediment to widespread use of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Nora Kassner , Oyvind Tafjord , Ashish Sabharwal , Kyle Richardson , Hinrich Schuetze , Peter Clark

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives and personalized. However, LLM personalization might also increase unintended side effects. Recent work suggests that persona prompting can lead models to falsely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco , Paul Röttger , Nino Scherrer , Emanuele Borgonovo , Elmar Plischke , Dirk Hovy

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve remarkable success through explicit thinking steps, yet the thinking steps introduce a novel risk by potentially amplifying unsafe behaviors. Despite this vulnerability, conventional defense mechanisms…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Su-Hyeon Kim , Hyundong Jin , Yejin Lee , Yo-Sub Han

Many state-of-the-art LLMs are trained to think before giving their answer. Reasoning can greatly improve language model capabilities, but it also makes them less interactive: given a new input, a model must stop thinking before it can…

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