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Retrieval-augmented LLMs are deployed for tasks where evidence quality determines action safety, yet evaluation protocols assume that single-turn robustness predicts robustness when evidence accumulates across turns. We show this assumption…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhe Yu , Wenpeng Xing , Chen Ye , Xuyang Teng , Bo Yang , Changting Lin , Meng Han

Safety-aligned language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet refusal behavior can be suppressed by steering their internal representations. Existing methods do so by ablating a refusal direction from model activations, aiming…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Giorgio Piras , Raffaele Mura , Fabio Brau , Maura Pintor , Luca Oneto , Fabio Roli , Battista Biggio

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized various applications, making robust safety alignment essential to prevent harmful outputs. Current safety alignment techniques, however, harbor inherent vulnerabilities due to their reliance…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yuxi Li , Yi Liu , Yuekang Li , Ling Shi , Gelei Deng , Shengquan Chen , Kailong Wang

Large language models often face a three-way trade-off among detection accuracy, inference latency, and deployment cost when used in real-world safety-sensitive applications. This paper introduces Prefix Probing, a black-box harmful content…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Jirui Yang , Hengqi Guo , Zhihui Lu , Yi Zhao , Yuansen Zhang , Shijing Hu , Qiang Duan , Yinggui Wang , Tao Wei

Minimizing inconsistencies across successive versions of an AI system is as crucial as reducing the overall error. In image classification, such inconsistencies manifest as negative flips, where an updated model misclassifies test samples…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Simone Ricci , Niccolò Biondi , Federico Pernici , Alberto Del Bimbo

Adversarial prompts generated using gradient-based methods exhibit outstanding performance in performing automatic jailbreak attacks against safety-aligned LLMs. Nevertheless, due to the discrete nature of texts, the input gradient of LLMs…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Qizhang Li , Yiwen Guo , Wangmeng Zuo , Hao Chen

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly expose chain-of-thought-like reasoning for transparency, verification, and deliberate problem solving. This creates a safety blind spot: harmful or policy-violating content may appear in reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xiaomin Li , Jianheng Hou , Zheyuan Deng , Zhiwei Zhang , Taoran Li , Binghang Lu , Bing Hu , Yunhan Zhao , Yuexing Hao

Jailbreak attacks on Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated various successful methods whereby attackers manipulate models into generating harmful responses that they are designed to avoid. Among these, Greedy Coordinate Gradient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Junjie Mu , Zonghao Ying , Zhekui Fan , Zonglei Jing , Yaoyuan Zhang , Zhengmin Yu , Wenxin Zhang , Quanchen Zou , Xiangzheng Zhang

Current safety evaluations of language models rely on benchmark-based assessments that may miss localized vulnerabilities. We present RepIt, a simple and data-efficient framework for isolating concept-specific representations in LM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Vincent Siu , Nathan W. Henry , Nicholas Crispino , Yang Liu , Dawn Song , Chenguang Wang

In neural network models, soft mixtures of fixed candidate components (e.g., logic gates and sub-networks) are often used during training for stable optimization, while hard selection is typically used at inference. This raises questions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Youngsung Kim

This paper presents a comprehensive empirical study on the safety alignment capabilities. We evaluate what matters for safety alignment in LLMs and LRMs to provide essential insights for developing more secure and reliable AI systems. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Xing Li , Hui-Ling Zhen , Lihao Yin , Xianzhi Yu , Zhenhua Dong , Mingxuan Yuan

Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) have attracted significant attention for their safety, particularly in the context of jailbreak attacks that attempt to bypass guardrails via adversarial prompts. Among existing approaches, the Greedy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xiao Li , Wei Zhang , Zhuhong Li , Qiongxiu Li , Shei PernChua , BingZe Lee , Jinghao Cui , Yifan Huang , Xiaolin Hu

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in critical applications, ensuring their robustness and safety alignment remains a major challenge. Despite the overall success of alignment techniques such as reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-21 Sajib Biswas , Mao Nishino , Samuel Jacob Chacko , Xiuwen Liu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have become powerful tools for complex problem solving, but their structured reasoning pathways can lead to unsafe outputs when exposed to harmful prompts. Existing safety alignment methods reduce harmful…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Wonje Jeung , Sangyeon Yoon , Minsuk Kahng , Albert No

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

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text by iteratively unmasking tokens from a fully masked sequence. Their standard confidence-based unmasking strategy systematically defers high-entropy logical connective tokens, degrading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Shaik Aman

Alignment-tuned language models frequently suppress factual log-probabilities on politically sensitive topics despite retaining the knowledge in their hidden representations. We show that a 786K-parameter (approximately 0.02% of the base…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Bryan Sanchez

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has become the predominant approach for language model (LM) alignment. At its core, RLHF uses a margin-based loss for preference optimization, specifying ideal LM behavior only by the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-23 Hui Yuan , Yifan Zeng , Yue Wu , Huazheng Wang , Mengdi Wang , Liu Leqi

Recent work has demonstrated the potential of contrastive steering for jailbreaking Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods rely on limited and inherently biased contrastive prompts and require laborious manual tuning of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Junxi Chen , Junhao Dong , Xiaohua Xie

In recent years, the rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has achieved remarkable performance across various tasks. However, research indicates that LLMs are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, where adversaries can induce the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-08-23 Jiawei Zhao , Kejiang Chen , Xiaojian Yuan , Weiming Zhang