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Related papers: LLMs Encode Harmfulness and Refusal Separately

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Jailbreak attacks pose a serious threat to the safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) by crafting adversarial prompts that bypass alignment mechanisms, causing the models to produce harmful, restricted, or biased content. In this paper, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Xiangman Li , Xiaodong Wu , Qi Li , Jianbing Ni , Rongxing Lu

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to a type of attack known as jailbreaking, which misleads LLMs to output harmful contents. Although there are diverse jailbreak attack strategies, there is no unified understanding on why some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-04 Yuping Lin , Pengfei He , Han Xu , Yue Xing , Makoto Yamada , Hui Liu , Jiliang Tang

Extensive work has been devoted to improving the safety mechanism of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, LLMs still tend to generate harmful responses when faced with malicious instructions, a phenomenon referred to as "Jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Ming Ma , Yuhan Chen , Bing Qin

Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that exploit weaknesses in traditional safety alignment, which often relies on rigid refusal heuristics or representation engineering to block harmful outputs. While they are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Yuyou Zhang , Miao Li , William Han , Yihang Yao , Zhepeng Cen , Ding Zhao

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential as general-purpose AI assistants in various domains. To meet the requirements of different applications, LLMs are often customized by further fine-tuning. However, the powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Xin Zhou , Yi Lu , Ruotian Ma , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Giorgio Piras , Raffaele Mura , Fabio Brau , Luca Oneto , Fabio Roli , Battista Biggio

Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction-tuned models, Gemma-2-2B-IT and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Nirmalendu Prakash , Yeo Wei Jie , Amir Abdullah , Ranjan Satapathy , Erik Cambria , Roy Ka Wei Lee

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Wenbo Pan , Zhichao Liu , Qiguang Chen , Xiangyang Zhou , Haining Yu , Xiaohua Jia

Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid responding to malicious user inputs. Unfortunately, jailbreak can circumvent safety guardrails, resulting in LLMs generating harmful content and raising concerns about LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Zhenhong Zhou , Haiyang Yu , Xinghua Zhang , Rongwu Xu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

Open-weight language models can be rendered unsafe through several distinct interventions, but the resulting models may differ substantially in capabilities, behavioral profile, and internal failure mode. We study behavioral and mechanistic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Md Rysul Kabir , Zoran Tiganj

Jailbreaking large language models (LLMs) has emerged as a critical security challenge with the widespread deployment of conversational AI systems. Adversarial users exploit these models through carefully crafted prompts to elicit…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Sri Durga Sai Sowmya Kadali , Evangelos E. Papalexakis

Long-context LLMs can infer objectives that are not stated explicitly. This capability is useful for reasoning over documents, code, retrieved evidence, and tool traces, but it also creates a safety risk: harmful intent can be distributed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yu Fu , Haz Sameen Shahgir , Huanli Gong , Zhipeng Wei , N. Benjamin Erichson , Yue Dong

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a range of vulnerabilities that allow malicious users to solicit undesirable responses through manipulation of the input text. These so-called jailbreak prompts are designed to trick the LLM into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 John Hawkins , Aditya Pramar , Rodney Beard , Rohitash Chandra

While there has been progress towards aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values and ensuring safe behaviour at inference time, safety guards can easily be removed when fine tuned on unsafe and harmful datasets. While this…

Despite extensive safety-tuning, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks via adversarially crafted instructions, reflecting a persistent trade-off between safety and task performance. In this work, we propose…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Wei Jie Yeo , Ranjan Satapathy , Erik Cambria

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense utility across various industries. However, as LLMs advance, the risk of harmful outputs increases due to incorrect or malicious instruction prompts. While current methods effectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Xinyi Zeng , Yuying Shang , Jiawei Chen , Jingyuan Zhang , Yu Tian

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified the need to understand and reliably curb their harmful behaviours. We introduce a multidimensional framework for probing and steering harmful content in model internals. For…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 McNair Shah , Saleena Angeline , Adhitya Rajendra Kumar , Naitik Chheda , Kevin Zhu , Vasu Sharma , Sean O'Brien , Will Cai

The jailbreak attack can bypass the safety measures of a Large Language Model (LLM), generating harmful content. This misuse of LLM has led to negative societal consequences. Currently, there are two main approaches to address jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Zezhong Wang , Fangkai Yang , Lu Wang , Pu Zhao , Hongru Wang , Liang Chen , Qingwei Lin , Kam-Fai Wong

Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly reshape modern life, advancing fields from healthcare to education and beyond. However, alongside their remarkable capabilities lies a significant threat: the susceptibility of these models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Michael Fire , Yitzhak Elbazis , Adi Wasenstein , Lior Rokach

Considerable research efforts have been devoted to ensuring that large language models (LLMs) align with human values and generate safe text. However, an excessive focus on sensitivity to certain topics can compromise the model's robustness…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-29 Huachuan Qiu , Shuai Zhang , Anqi Li , Hongliang He , Zhenzhong Lan
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