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Related papers: SAFER: Advancing Safety Alignment via Efficient Ex…

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The current safeguard mechanisms for large language models (LLMs) are indeed susceptible to jailbreak attacks, making them inherently fragile. Even the process of fine-tuning on apparently benign data for downstream tasks can jeopardize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-16 Xin Yi , Shunfan Zheng , Linlin Wang , Xiaoling Wang , Liang He

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress, yet their safety alignment remains limited. Typically, current open-source MLLMs rely on the alignment inherited from their language module to avoid harmful…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yanbo Wang , Jiyang Guan , Jian Liang , Ran He

Large language models require continuous adaptation to new tasks while preserving safety alignment. However, fine-tuning on even benign data often compromises safety behaviors, including refusal of harmful requests, truthfulness, and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Thong Bach , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to be vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks where adversarial prompts are designed to elicit harmful responses. While existing defenses effectively mitigate single-turn attacks by detecting and filtering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Hanjiang Hu , Alexander Robey , Changliu Liu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance on complex tasks, but they also make safety control harder at deployment time. In black-box settings, defenders cannot modify model weights and must instead intervene at inference time. This…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Zhenhao Xu , Wenhan Chang , Yichuan Chen , Yuxin Fang , Junhao Liu , Tianqing Zhu

The current paradigm for safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) follows a one-size-fits-all approach: the model refuses to interact with any content deemed unsafe by the model provider. This approach lacks flexibility in the face…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Jingyu Zhang , Ahmed Elgohary , Ahmed Magooda , Daniel Khashabi , Benjamin Van Durme

Fine-tuning language models is commonly believed to inevitably harm their safety, i.e., refusing to respond to harmful user requests, even when using harmless datasets, thus requiring additional safety measures. We challenge this belief…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Minseon Kim , Jin Myung Kwak , Lama Alssum , Bernard Ghanem , Philip Torr , David Krueger , Fazl Barez , Adel Bibi

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) unlock powerful multimodal reasoning but also expand the attack surface, particularly through adversarial inputs that conceal harmful goals in benign prompts. We propose SHIELD, a lightweight,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Juan Ren , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language reasoning tasks, yet ensuring their safety remains a critical challenge. Recent input-side defenses detect unsafe images with CLIP and prepend safety…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Xingyu Zhu , Beier Zhu , Junfeng Fang , Shuo Wang , Yin Zhang , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Defending against jailbreak attacks is crucial for the safe deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent research has attempted to improve safety by training models to reason over safety rules before responding. However, a key issue…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Di Wu , Yanyan Zhao , Xin Lu , Mingzhe Li , Bing Qin

Generative large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing with their transformative and emergent capabilities. However, recent evidence indicates that LLMs can produce harmful content that violates social…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Xiaohan Yuan , Jinfeng Li , Dongxia Wang , Yuefeng Chen , Xiaofeng Mao , Longtao Huang , Jialuo Chen , Hui Xue , Xiaoxia Liu , Wenhai Wang , Kui Ren , Jingyi Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with computational efficiency and error propagation in multi-step reasoning tasks. While recent advancements on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning, they…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuan Sui , Yufei He , Tri Cao , Simeng Han , Yulin Chen , Bryan Hooi

Safety alignment -- training large language models (LLMs) to refuse harmful requests while remaining helpful -- is critical for responsible deployment. Prior work established that safety behaviors are governed by low-rank structures,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Dianyun Wang , Qingsen Ma , Yuhu Shang , Zhifeng Lu , Zhenbo Xu , Lechen Ning , Huijia Wu , Zhaofeng He

The ideal AI safety moderation system would be both structurally interpretable (so its decisions can be reliably explained) and steerable (to align to safety standards and reflect a community's values), which current systems fall short on.…

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

Larger language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm with their massive multi-tasking capabilities simply by optimizing over a next-word prediction objective. With the emergence of their properties and encoded knowledge, the risk of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Rishabh Bhardwaj , Soujanya Poria

With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in Natural Language Processing (NLP), including content generation, human-computer interaction, machine translation, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Songyang Liu , Chaozhuo Li , Jiameng Qiu , Xi Zhang , Feiran Huang , Litian Zhang , Yiming Hei , Philip S. Yu

Although Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have progressed in solving complex problems, their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often contains harmful content that can persist even when the final responses appear safe. We show that this issue…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yichi Zhang , Yue Ding , Jingwen Yang , Tianwei Luo , Dongbai Li , Ranjie Duan , Qiang Liu , Hang Su , Yinpeng Dong , Jun Zhu

Fine-tuning a general-purpose large language model (LLM) for a specific domain or task has become a routine procedure for ordinary users. However, fine-tuning is known to remove the safety alignment features of the model, even when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Kathleen C. Fraser , Hillary Dawkins , Isar Nejadgholi , Svetlana Kiritchenko

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) improves performance but introduces critical safety vulnerabilities: even minimal harmful data can severely compromise safety measures. We observe that perturbations orthogonal to the alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Shuo Yang , Qihui Zhang , Yuyang Liu , Xiaojun Jia , Kunpeng Ning , Jiayu Yao , Jigang Wang , Hailiang Dai , Yibing Song , Li Yuan