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In recent years, Large Language Models (LLM) have emerged as pivotal tools in various applications. However, these models are susceptible to adversarial prompt attacks, where attackers can carefully curate input strings that mislead LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Zhengmian Hu , Gang Wu , Saayan Mitra , Ruiyi Zhang , Tong Sun , Heng Huang , Viswanathan Swaminathan

Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to refuse harmful instructions through safety fine-tuning. A recent attack, termed abliteration, identifies and suppresses the single latent direction most responsible for refusal behavior,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Harethah Abu Shairah , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Bernard Ghanem , George Turkiyyah

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Giorgio Piras , Raffaele Mura , Fabio Brau , Maura Pintor , Luca Oneto , Fabio Roli , Battista Biggio

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yuxiao Lu , Lin Xu , Yang Sun , Wenjun Li , Jie Shi

Large language models and LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks that are inherently dual-use. Existing approaches to refusal, spanning academic policy frameworks and commercially deployed systems, often rely on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Noa Linder , Meirav Segal , Omer Antverg , Gil Gekker , Tomer Fichman , Omri Bodenheimer , Edan Maor , Omer Nevo

The pervasive deployment of large language models (LLMs) in conversational AI systems has revolutionized information access, yet their propensity for generating factually unsupported or hallucinated responses remains a critical impediment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Steven Robinson , Antonio Carlos Rivera

Large Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have achieved remarkable multimodal performance yet remain prone to factual hallucinations, particularly in long-tail or specialized domains. Moreover, current models exhibit a weak capacity to refuse…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Junru Song , Yimeng Hu , Yijing Chen , Huining Li , Qian Li , Lizhen Cui , Yuntao Du

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across sectors, yet their alignment with International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is not well understood. This study evaluates eight leading LLMs on their ability to refuse prompts that explicitly…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-06-10 John Mavi , Diana Teodora Găitan , Sergio Coronado

With the significant progress of large reasoning models in complex coding and reasoning tasks, existing benchmarks, like LiveCodeBench and CodeElo, are insufficient to evaluate the coding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) in real…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Shiyi Xu , Yiwen Hu , Yingqian Min , Zhipeng Chen , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Language Models (LMs) may acquire harmful knowledge, and yet feign ignorance of these topics when under audit. Inspired by the recent discovery of deception-related behaviour patterns in LMs, we aim to train classifiers that detect when a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Dhananjay Ashok , Ruth-Ann Armstrong , Jonathan May

Large Language Models (LLMs) should refuse to answer questions beyond their knowledge. This capability, which we term knowledge-aware refusal, is crucial for factual reliability, while existing metrics fail to capture this ability. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Wenbo Pan , Jie Xu , Qiguang Chen , Junhao Dong , Libo Qin , Xinfeng Li , Haining Yu , Xiaohua Jia

The rapid growth of large language models has spurred significant interest in model compression as a means to enhance their accessibility and practicality. While extensive research has explored model compression through the lens of safety,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-08 Vishnu Kabir Chhabra , Mohammad Mahdi Khalili

In LLM-based text-to-SQL systems, unanswerable and underspecified user queries may generate not only incorrect text but also executable programs that yield misleading results or violate safety constraints, posing a major barrier to safe…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Xuancheng Ren , Shijing Hu , Zhihui Lu , Jiangqi Huang , Qiang Duan

Current safety evaluations of language models rely on benchmark-based assessments that may miss localized vulnerabilities. We present RepIt, a simple and data-efficient framework for isolating concept-specific representations in LM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Vincent Siu , Nathan W. Henry , Nicholas Crispino , Yang Liu , Dawn Song , Chenguang Wang

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Justin Cui , Wei-Lin Chiang , Ion Stoica , Cho-Jui Hsieh

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-09 Zedian Shao , Hongbin Liu , Yuepeng Hu , Neil Zhenqiang Gong

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-12 Bang An , Sicheng Zhu , Ruiyi Zhang , Michael-Andrei Panaitescu-Liess , Yuancheng Xu , Furong Huang

We introduce a method to reduce refusal rates of large language models (LLMs) on sensitive content without modifying model weights or prompts. Motivated by the observation that refusals in certain models were often preceded by the specific…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Harvey Dam , Jonas Knochelmann , Vinu Joseph , Ganesh Gopalakrishnan

Continual Learning (CL) is essential for enabling self-evolving large language models (LLMs) to adapt and remain effective amid rapid knowledge growth. Yet, despite its importance, little attention has been given to establishing statistical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Xiaofan Zhou , Lu Cheng

Topic models have been the prominent tools for automatic topic discovery from text corpora. Despite their effectiveness, topic models suffer from several limitations including the inability of modeling word ordering information in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-02-10 Yu Meng , Yunyi Zhang , Jiaxin Huang , Yu Zhang , Jiawei Han