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Safety alignment mechanisms in Large Language Models (LLMs) often operate as latent internal states, obscuring the model's inherent capabilities. Building on this observation, we model the safety mechanism as an unobserved confounder from a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Yao Zhou , Zeen Song , Wenwen Qiang , Fengge Wu , Shuyi Zhou , Changwen Zheng , Hui Xiong

In-context learning, the ability to adapt based on a few examples in the input prompt, is a ubiquitous feature of large language models (LLMs). However, as LLMs' in-context learning abilities continue to improve, understanding this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Can Demircan , Tankred Saanum , Akshay K. Jagadish , Marcel Binz , Eric Schulz

Military Large Language Models (LLMs) must provide accurate information to the warfighter in time-critical and dangerous situations. However, today's LLMs are imbued with safety behaviors that cause the LLM to refuse many legitimate queries…

In order to be deployed safely, Large Language Models (LLMs) must be capable of dynamically adapting their behavior based on their level of knowledge and uncertainty associated with specific topics. This adaptive behavior, which we refer to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Alexandre Piché , Aristides Milios , Dzmitry Bahdanau , Chris Pal

Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned to meet ethical standards and safety requirements by training them to refuse answering harmful or unsafe prompts. In this paper, we demonstrate how adversaries can exploit LLMs' alignment to implant…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Md Abdullah Al Mamun , Ihsen Alouani , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

Additive models enjoy the flexibility of nonlinear models while still being readily understandable to humans. By contrast, other nonlinear models, which involve interactions between features, are not only harder to fit but also…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-06-03 Yiling Huang , Snigdha Panigrahi , Guo Yu , Jacob Bien

This paper establishes a connection between the fields of machine learning (ML) and philosophy concerning the phenomenon of behaving neutrally. It investigates a specific class of ML systems capable of delivering a neutral response to a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Daniela Schuster

Large language models (LLMs) encode a diverse range of linguistic features within their latent representations, which can be harnessed to steer their output toward specific target characteristics. In this paper, we modify the internal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Pedram Rooshenas

Large Language Models (LLMs) encode factual knowledge within hidden parametric spaces that are difficult to inspect or control. While Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) can decompose hidden activations into more fine-grained, interpretable…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Minglai Yang , Xinyu Guo , Zhengliang Shi , Jinhe Bi , Steven Bethard , Mihai Surdeanu , Liangming Pan

Recently, there has been an increase in interest in evaluating large language models for emergent and dangerous capabilities. Importantly, agents could reason that in some scenarios their goal is better achieved if they are not turned off,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-04 Teun van der Weij , Simon Lermen , Leon lang

Aligned large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Recent mechanistic studies have identified latent features and representation shifts associated with jailbreak success, but they leave a more fundamental question…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yu Chen , Yuanhao Liu , Qi Cao

Large language models (LLMs), despite possessing latent safety understanding from their vast pretraining data, remain vulnerable to generating harmful content and exhibit issues such as over-refusal and utility degradation after safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Yi Zhang , An Zhang , XiuYu Zhang , Leheng Sheng , Yuxin Chen , Zhenkai Liang , Xiang Wang

Traditional (fickle) adversarial examples involve finding a small perturbation that does not change an input's true label but confuses the classifier into outputting a different prediction. Conversely, obstinate adversarial examples occur…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-01 Hannah Chen , Yangfeng Ji , David Evans

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are routinely evaluated by other LLMs trained to predict human preferences. This framework--known as LLM-as-a-judge--is highly scalable and relatively low cost. However, it is also vulnerable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Lisa Alazraki , Tan Yi-Chern , Jon Ander Campos , Maximilian Mozes , Marek Rei , Max Bartolo

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for language model steering. Prior work has explored top-k SAE latents for steering, but we observe that many dimensions among the top-k latents capture non-semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jiaqing Xie

Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance across diverse tasks yet remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safety mechanisms. We present RAID (Refusal-Aware and Integrated Decoding), a framework that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Tuan T. Nguyen , John Le , Thai T. Vu , Willy Susilo , Heath Cooper

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, their ability to refuse ethically sensitive prompts-such as those involving hate speech or illegal activities-has become central to content moderation and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Stefan Pasch

Large language models are meticulously aligned to be both helpful and harmless. However, recent research points to a potential overkill which means models may refuse to answer benign queries. In this paper, we investigate the factors for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-01 Chenyu Shi , Xiao Wang , Qiming Ge , Songyang Gao , Xianjun Yang , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang , Xun Zhao , Dahua Lin

Reward models (RMs) are at the crux of successfully using RLHF to align pretrained models to human preferences, yet there has been relatively little study that focuses on evaluation of those models. Evaluating reward models presents an…

Learning-enabled components (LECs) are widely used in cyber-physical systems (CPS) since they can handle the uncertainty and variability of the environment and increase the level of autonomy. However, it has been shown that LECs such as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-25 Feiyang Cai , Jiani Li , Xenofon Koutsoukos