Related papers: FalseReject: A Resource for Improving Contextual S…

Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly rely on explicit refusal prefixes for safety, making them vulnerable to prefix injection attacks. We introduce HumorReject, a novel data-driven approach that reimagines LLM safety by decoupling it from…

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 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…

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) sometimes falsely refuse pseudo-harmful prompts, like "how to kill a mosquito," which are actually harmless. Frequent false refusals not only frustrate users but also provoke a public backlash…

Large Language Models (LLMs) require careful safety alignment to prevent malicious outputs. While significant research focuses on mitigating harmful content generation, the enhanced safety often come with the side effect of over-refusal,…

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…

LLMs increasingly exhibit over-refusal behavior, where safety mechanisms cause models to reject benign instructions that seemingly resemble harmful content. This phenomenon diminishes utility in production applications that repeatedly rely…

Many studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can produce harmful responses, exposing users to unexpected risks when LLMs are deployed. Previous studies have proposed comprehensive taxonomies of the risks posed by LLMs,…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) induces over-refusals -- where LLMs decline benign requests due to aggressive safety filters. We analyze this phenomenon in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where both the query intent…

Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce false refusals, declining benign requests that contain terms resembling unsafe queries. We address this challenge by introducing two comprehensive benchmarks: the Exaggerated Safety Benchmark…

This study addresses a critical gap in safety tuning practices for Large Language Models (LLMs) by identifying and tackling a refusal position bias within safety tuning data, which compromises the models' ability to appropriately refuse…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet they often refuse to answer legitimate queries--a phenomenon known as overrefusal. Overrefusal typically stems from over-conservative…

This study reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing aligned LLMs predominantly respond to unsafe queries with refusals, which often begin with a fixed set of prefixes…

Refusal mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring safety. Recent research has revealed that refusal behavior can be mediated by a single direction in activation space, enabling targeted interventions to bypass…

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…

With the growing prevalence of large language models (LLMs), the safety of LLMs has raised significant concerns. However, there is still a lack of definitive standards for evaluating their safety due to the subjective nature of current…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit weaknesses in traditional safety alignment, which often relies on rigid refusal heuristics or representation engineering to block harmful outputs. While they are…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to advance in understanding and generating long sequences, new safety concerns have been introduced through the long context. However, the safety of LLMs in long-context tasks remains under-explored,…

The past year has seen rapid acceleration in the development of large language models (LLMs). However, without proper steering and safeguards, LLMs will readily follow malicious instructions, provide unsafe advice, and generate toxic…

Ensuring safe and appropriate responses from vision-language models (VLMs) remains a critical challenge, particularly in high-risk or ambiguous scenarios. We introduce SafeCoT, a lightweight, interpretable framework that leverages…