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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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yangyang Guo , Ziwei Xu , Si Liu , Zhiming Zheng , Mohan Kankanhalli

Recent defenses for safeguarding open-weight large language models (LLMs) are intended to prevent adversarial usage. Underlying these defenses is an assumption that new harmful behavior is learned through fine-tuning rather than elicited by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kevin Kuo , Chhavi Yadav , Virginia Smith

Open-weight LLMs can be modified at inference time with simple activation edits, which raises a practical question for safety: do common safety interventions like refusal training or metatag training survive such edits? We study model…

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that can elicit harmful responses. Defending against such attacks remains challenging due to the opacity of jailbreaking mechanisms and the high computational cost of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Lei Yu , Virginie Do , Karen Hambardzumyan , Nicola Cancedda

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in security-sensitive applications, where they must follow system- or developer-specified instructions that define the intended task behavior, while completing benign user requests.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Li , Chenxiao Yu , Zhiyu Ni , Hao Li , Charith Peris , Chaowei Xiao , Yue Zhao

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs), particularly for cybersecurity tasks, primarily focuses on preventing misuse. While this approach reduces direct harm, it obscures a complementary failure mode: denial of assistance to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-12 David Campbell , Neil Kale , Udari Madhushani Sehwag , Bert Herring , Nick Price , Dan Borges , Alex Levinson , Christina Q Knight

Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction-tuned models, Gemma-2-2B-IT and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Nirmalendu Prakash , Yeo Wei Jie , Amir Abdullah , Ranjan Satapathy , Erik Cambria , Roy Ka Wei Lee

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zhiyu Xue , Zimo Qi , Guangliang Liu , Bocheng Chen , Ramtin Pedarsani

Large language models (LLMs) are popular for high-quality text generation but can produce harmful content, even when aligned with human values through reinforcement learning. Adversarial prompts can bypass their safety measures. We propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Mansi Phute , Alec Helbling , Matthew Hull , ShengYun Peng , Sebastian Szyller , Cory Cornelius , Duen Horng Chau

Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models (LLMs). Current safety alignment methods have attempted to address these issues, but they experience two significant limitations: insufficient safety alignment depth and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Yuanbo Xie , Yingjie Zhang , Tianyun Liu , Duohe Ma , Tingwen Liu

With the growing adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) in critical areas, ensuring their security against jailbreaking attacks is paramount. While traditional defenses primarily rely on refusing malicious prompts, recent logit-level…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yassine Rachidy , Jihad Rbaiti , Youssef Hmamouche , Faissal Sehbaoui , Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni

Although many large language models (LLMs) have been trained to refuse harmful requests, they are still vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks which rewrite the original prompt to conceal its harmful intent. In this paper, we propose a new…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Yihan Wang , Zhouxing Shi , Andrew Bai , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Refusal behavior in large language models (LLMs) enables them to decline responding to harmful, unethical, or inappropriate prompts, ensuring alignment with ethical standards. This paper investigates refusal behavior across six LLMs from…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Fabian Hildebrandt , Andreas Maier , Patrick Krauss , Achim Schilling

Recently, language models like Llama 3.1 Instruct have become increasingly capable of agentic behavior, enabling them to perform tasks requiring short-term planning and tool use. In this study, we apply refusal-vector ablation to Llama 3.1…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-16 Simon Lermen , Mateusz Dziemian , Govind Pimpale

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yuyou Zhang , Miao Li , William Han , Yihang Yao , Zhepeng Cen , Ding Zhao

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements and are now widely used across various domains. Unfortunately, there has been a rising concern that LLMs can be misused to generate harmful or malicious content.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Bochuan Cao , Yuanpu Cao , Lu Lin , Jinghui Chen

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Youliang Yuan , Wenxiang Jiao , Wenxuan Wang , Jen-tse Huang , Jiahao Xu , Tian Liang , Pinjia He , Zhaopeng Tu

The increasing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into society necessitates robust defenses against vulnerabilities from jailbreaking and adversarial prompts. This project proposes a recursive framework for enhancing the resistance…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-10 Bryan Li , Sounak Bagchi , Zizhan Wang

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate refusal responses to harmless queries due to the over-refusal problem. However, existing methods for mitigating over-refusal cannot maintain a low refusal ratio for harmless queries…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yupeng Qi , Ziyu Lyu , Lixin Cui , Lu Bai , Feng Xia
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