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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

Recent work has shown that language models' refusal behavior is primarily encoded in a single direction in their latent space, making it vulnerable to targeted attacks. Although Latent Adversarial Training (LAT) attempts to improve…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Alexandra Abbas , Nora Petrova , Helios Ael Lyons , Natalia Perez-Campanero

Large language models (LLMs), known for their capability in understanding and following instructions, are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Researchers have found that current commercial LLMs either fail to be "harmless" by presenting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Bocheng Chen , Advait Paliwal , Qiben Yan

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful tools with profound societal impacts, yet their ability to generate responses to diverse and uncontrolled inputs leaves them vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While existing defenses often struggle…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Samuel Simko , Mrinmaya Sachan , Bernhard Schölkopf , Zhijing Jin

AI developers often apply safety alignment procedures to prevent the misuse of their AI systems. For example, before Meta released Llama 2-Chat - a collection of instruction fine-tuned large language models - they invested heavily in safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Simon Lermen , Charlie Rogers-Smith , Jeffrey Ladish

This paper presents a systematic evaluation of Large Language Models' (LLMs) behavior on long-tail distributed (encrypted) texts and their safety implications. We introduce a two-dimensional framework for assessing LLM safety: (1)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Utsav Maskey , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools, but their inherent safety risks - ranging from harmful content generation to broader societal harms - pose significant challenges. These risks can be amplified by the recent…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked widespread concerns about their safety. Recent work demonstrates that safety alignment of LLMs can be easily removed by fine-tuning with a few adversarially chosen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Samuele Poppi , Zheng-Xin Yong , Yifei He , Bobbie Chern , Han Zhao , Aobo Yang , Jianfeng Chi

While large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been applied to hate speech detoxification, the prompts often trigger safety alerts, causing LLMs to refuse the task. In this study, we systematically investigate false refusal behavior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Kyuri Im , Shuzhou Yuan , Michael Färber

To circumvent the alignment of large language models (LLMs), current optimization-based adversarial attacks usually craft adversarial prompts by maximizing the likelihood of a so-called affirmative response. An affirmative response is a…

Safety-aligned language models refuse harmful requests through learned refusal behaviors encoded in their internal representations. Recent activation-based jailbreaking methods circumvent these safety mechanisms by applying orthogonal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Geraldin Nanfack , Eugene Belilovsky , Elvis Dohmatob

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that fine-tuning and human alignment can render LLMs harmless. In practice, such "harmlessness" behavior is mainly achieved by training models to reject harmful requests,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-25 Shengyun Si , Xinpeng Wang , Guangyao Zhai , Nassir Navab , Barbara Plank

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated revolutionary capabilities in understanding complex contexts and performing a wide range of tasks. However, LLMs can also answer questions that are unethical or harmful, raising concerns about…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Kang Yang , Guanhong Tao , Xun Chen , Jun Xu

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 (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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zihui Wu , Haichang Gao , Jiacheng Luo , Zhaoxiang Liu

Refusal is a key safety behavior in aligned language models, yet the internal mechanisms driving refusals remain opaque. In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study of refusal in instruction-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Jie Yeo , Nirmalendu Prakash , Clement Neo , Roy Ka-Wei Lee , Erik Cambria , Ranjan Satapathy

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Recent model editing-based approaches enable efficient backdoor injection by directly modifying a small set of parameters to map triggers to attacker-desired…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Houcheng Jiang , Zetong Zhao , Junfeng Fang , Haokai Ma , Ruipeng Wang , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He , Yang Deng

Large language models (LLMs) can often be made to behave in undesirable ways that they are explicitly fine-tuned not to. For example, the LLM red-teaming literature has produced a wide variety of 'jailbreaking' techniques to elicit harmful…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance and have come to dominate the field of natural language processing (NLP) across various tasks. However, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yulin Chen , Haoran Li , Yuan Sui , Yue Liu , Yufei He , Xiaoling Bai , Chi Fei , Yabo Li , Haozhe Ma , Yangqiu Song , Bryan Hooi

This work introduces a novel framework for evaluating LLMs' capacity to balance instruction-following with critical reasoning when presented with multiple-choice questions containing no valid answers. Through systematic evaluation across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gracjan Góral , Emilia Wiśnios , Piotr Sankowski , Paweł Budzianowski