Related papers: SafeConstellations: Mitigating Over-Refusals in LL…
Aligned language models that are trained to refuse harmful requests also exhibit over-refusal: they decline safe instructions that seemingly resemble harmful instructions. A natural approach is to ablate the global refusal direction,…
Safety alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) refuse harmful requests by post-training on harmful queries paired with refusal answers. Although safety alignment is widely adopted in industry, the overrefusal problem…
Safety alignment approaches in large language models (LLMs) often lead to the over-refusal of benign queries, significantly diminishing their utility in sensitive scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce FalseReject, a…
This study reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing aligned LLMs predominantly respond to unsafe queries with refusals, which often begin with a fixed set of prefixes…
Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise,…
Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to refuse harmful instructions through safety fine-tuning. A recent attack, termed abliteration, identifies and suppresses the single latent direction most responsible for refusal behavior,…
Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…
Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate refusal responses to harmless queries due to the over-refusal problem. However, existing methods for mitigating over-refusal cannot maintain a low refusal ratio for harmless queries…
Large language models demonstrate powerful capabilities across various natural language processing tasks, yet they also harbor safety vulnerabilities. To enhance LLM safety, various jailbreak defense methods have been proposed to guard…
LLMs are trained to refuse harmful instructions, but do they truly understand harmfulness beyond just refusing? Prior work has shown that LLMs' refusal behaviors can be mediated by a one-dimensional subspace, i.e., a refusal direction. In…
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…
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…
Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is primarily evaluated under open-ended generation, where models can mitigate risk by refusing to respond. In contrast, many real-world applications place LLMs in structured decision-making…
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated that fine-tuning and human alignment can render LLMs harmless. In practice, such "harmlessness" behavior is mainly achieved by training models to reject harmful requests,…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to obey safe requests while refusing harmful ones. However, traditional refusal mechanisms often lead to "rigid rejection," where a general template (e.g., "I cannot fulfill this…
Safety alignment of large language models currently faces a central challenge: existing alignment techniques often prioritize mitigating responses to harmful prompts at the expense of overcautious behavior, leading models to incorrectly…
Despite their impressive capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit unwanted uncertainty, a phenomenon where a model changes a previously correct answer into an incorrect one when re-prompted. This behavior undermines trust and…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across sectors, yet their alignment with International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is not well understood. This study evaluates eight leading LLMs on their ability to refuse prompts that explicitly…