Related papers: COSMIC: Generalized Refusal Direction Identificati…

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) can be circumvented through adversarially crafted inputs, yet the mechanisms by which these attacks bypass safety barriers remain poorly understood. Prior work suggests that a single…

Refusal refers to the functional behavior enabling safety-aligned language models to reject harmful or unethical prompts. Following the growing scientific interest in mechanistic interpretability, recent work encoded refusal behavior as a…

Refusal mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring safety. Recent research has revealed that refusal behavior can be mediated by a single direction in activation space, enabling targeted interventions to bypass…

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…

We present a cost-effective method to integrate speech into a large language model (LLM), resulting in a Contextual Speech Model with Instruction-following/in-context-learning Capabilities (COSMIC) multi-modal LLM. Using GPT-3.5, we…

Humans build shared spatial understanding by communicating partial, viewpoint-dependent observations. We ask whether Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can do the same, aligning distinct egocentric views through dialogue to form a…

Prior work argues that refusal in large language models is mediated by a single activation-space direction, enabling effective steering and ablation. We show that this account is incomplete. Across eleven categories of refusal and…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate chain-of-thought (CoT) traces before producing final outputs, introducing a dynamic internal state that may complicate control mechanisms such as refusal. Unlike instruction-tuned LLMs, where refusal…

We introduce Refusal Steering, an inference-time method to exercise fine-grained control over Large Language Models refusal behaviour on politically sensitive topics without retraining. We replace fragile pattern-based refusal detection…

Inferring latent interaction structures from observed dynamics is a fundamental inverse problem in many-body interacting systems. Most neural approaches rely on black-box surrogates over trainable graphs, achieving accuracy at the expense…

Large Language Models' safety-aligned behaviors, such as refusing harmful queries, can be represented by linear directions in activation space. Previous research modeled safety behavior with a single direction, limiting mechanistic…

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), refusal mechanisms have become a critical component for ensuring responsible and safe model behavior. However, existing refusal strategies are largely \textit{one-size-fits-all}…

We introduce a closed-form method for identification of discrete-time linear time-variant systems from data, formulating the learning problem as a regularized least squares problem where the regularizer favors smooth solutions within a…

Reliably ensuring Large Language Models (LLMs) follow complex instructions is a critical challenge, as existing benchmarks often fail to reflect real-world use or isolate compliance from task success. We introduce MOSAIC (MOdular Synthetic…

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit highly anisotropic internal representations, often characterized by massive activations, a phenomenon where a small subset of feature dimensions possesses magnitudes significantly larger than the rest.…

LLMs increasingly exhibit over-refusal behavior, where safety mechanisms cause models to reject benign instructions that seemingly resemble harmful content. This phenomenon diminishes utility in production applications that repeatedly rely…

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance through pretraining on extensive data. This enables efficient adaptation to diverse downstream tasks. However, the lack of interpretability in their underlying mechanisms limits…

Language models are commonly fine-tuned for safety alignment to refuse harmful prompts. One approach fine-tunes them to generate categorical refusal tokens that distinguish different refusal types before responding. In this work, we…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is commonly implemented as a single static policy embedded in model parameters. However, real-world deployments often require context-dependent safety rules that vary across users, regions,…

Transformer language models (LMs) have been shown to represent concepts as directions in the latent space of hidden activations. However, for any human-interpretable concept, how can we find its direction in the latent space? We present a…