English
Related papers

Related papers: Understanding Refusal in Language Models with Spar…

200 papers

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities across a wide range of multimodal tasks. However, their integration of visual inputs introduces expanded attack surfaces, thereby exposing them to novel security…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Juan Ren , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the way we access information. These models are often tuned to refuse to comply with requests that are considered harmful and to produce responses that better align with the preferences of those…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Hannah Cyberey , David Evans

Large language models (LLMs), despite being safety-aligned, exhibit brittle refusal behaviors that can be circumvented by simple linguistic changes. As tense jailbreaking demonstrates that models refusing harmful requests often comply when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yein Park , Jungwoo Park , Jaewoo Kang

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

Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed as general-purpose tools, yet extended interaction can reveal behavioral patterns not captured by standard quantitative benchmarks. We present a qualitative case-study methodology for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-17 TK Lee

Large language models can resist task-misaligned activation steering during inference, sometimes recovering mid-generation to produce improved responses even when steering remains active. We term this Endogenous Steering Resistance (ESR).…

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Licheng Pan , Yongqi Tong , Xin Zhang , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Zhixuan Chu

Safety-aligned language models often refuse prompts that are actually harmless. Current evaluations mostly report global rates such as false rejection or compliance. These scores treat each prompt alone and miss local inconsistency, where a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Riad Ahmed Anonto , Md Labid Al Nahiyan , Md Tanvir Hassan

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved strong complex reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, their reasoning patterns remain too complicated to analyze. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Xuan Yang , Jiayu Liu , Yuhang Lai , Hao Xu , Zhenya Huang , Ning Miao

Frontier large language models are increasingly deployed as orchestration backbones for biological research workflows, yet no shared evidence base exists for comparing their refusal behaviour on legitimate research prompts. RefusalBench,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Lukas Weidener , Marko Brkić , Mihailo Jovanović , Emre Ulgac , Aakaash Meduri

Current LLMs are trained to refuse potentially harmful input queries regardless of whether users actually had harmful intents, causing a tradeoff between safety and user experience. Through a study of 480 participants evaluating 3,840…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Mingqian Zheng , Wenjia Hu , Patrick Zhao , Motahhare Eslami , Jena D. Hwang , Faeze Brahman , Carolyn Rose , Maarten Sap

Existing large language models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Two main approaches have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations: retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Youchao Zhou , Heyan Huang , Yicheng Liu , Rui Dai , Xinglin Wang , Xingchen Zhang , Shumin Shi , Yang Deng

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a popular tool for interpreting large language model activations, but their utility in addressing open questions in interpretability remains unclear. In this work, we demonstrate their effectiveness by using…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-21 Dmitrii Kharlapenko , Stepan Shabalin , Fazl Barez , Arthur Conmy , Neel Nanda

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Shuzhou Yuan , Ercong Nie , Yinuo Sun , Chenxuan Zhao , William LaCroix , Michael Färber

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance on tasks requiring complex linguistic abilities, such as reference disambiguation and metaphor recognition/generation. Although LLMs possess impressive capabilities, their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Yi Jing , Zijun Yao , Hongzhu Guo , Lingxu Ran , Xiaozhi Wang , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced dialogue systems and role-playing agents through their ability to generate human-like text. While prior studies have shown that LLMs can exhibit distinct and consistent personalities,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Shu Yang , Shenzhe Zhu , Liang Liu , Lijie Hu , Mengdi Li , Di Wang

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) has sparked widespread and general interest due to their strong language generation capabilities, offering great potential for both industry and research. While previous research delved into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Lukas Struppek , Minh Hieu Le , Dominik Hintersdorf , Kristian Kersting

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence, demonstrating remarkable computational power and linguistic capabilities. However, these models are inherently prone to various biases stemming from their training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Riccardo Cantini , Giada Cosenza , Alessio Orsino , Domenico Talia

Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Bingbing Wen , Jihan Yao , Shangbin Feng , Chenjun Xu , Yulia Tsvetkov , Bill Howe , Lucy Lu Wang
‹ Prev 1 3 4 5 6 7 10 Next ›