Related papers: SafeConstellations: Mitigating Over-Refusals in LL…
Content Warning: This paper contains participant quotes and discussions related to mental health challenges, emotional distress, and suicidal ideation. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for mental health support, yet the…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have become the cornerstone of today's generative AI ecosystem, sparking intense competition among tech giants and startups. In particular, an MLLM generates a text response given a prompt consisting…
Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vulnerable to adversarial misuse. While prior work has shown that safety-relevant features are encoded…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in security-sensitive applications, where they must follow system- or developer-specified instructions that define the intended task behavior, while completing benign user requests.…
Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models (LLMs). Current safety alignment methods have attempted to address these issues, but they experience two significant limitations: insufficient safety alignment depth and…
Recent studies on the safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) have revealed that existing approaches often operate superficially, leaving models vulnerable to various adversarial attacks. Despite their significance, these studies…
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…
This work introduces a novel framework for evaluating LLMs' capacity to balance instruction-following with critical reasoning when presented with multiple-choice questions containing no valid answers. Through systematic evaluation across…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive language understanding and generation capabilities, enabling them to answer a wide range of questions across various domains. However, these models are not flawless and often produce…
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…
Safety-aligned language models refuse harmful requests through learned refusal behaviors encoded in their internal representations. Recent activation-based jailbreaking methods circumvent these safety mechanisms by applying orthogonal…
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…
Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs), particularly for cybersecurity tasks, primarily focuses on preventing misuse. While this approach reduces direct harm, it obscures a complementary failure mode: denial of assistance to…
Open-weight LLMs can be modified at inference time with simple activation edits, which raises a practical question for safety: do common safety interventions like refusal training or metatag training survive such edits? We study model…
Safety alignment is crucial for large language models (LLMs) to resist malicious instructions but often results in over-refusals, where benign prompts are unnecessarily rejected, impairing user experience and model utility. We introduce…
This paper presents a systematic evaluation of Large Language Models' (LLMs) behavior on long-tail distributed (encrypted) texts and their safety implications. We introduce a two-dimensional framework for assessing LLM safety: (1)…
This study addresses a critical gap in safety tuning practices for Large Language Models (LLMs) by identifying and tackling a refusal position bias within safety tuning data, which compromises the models' ability to appropriately refuse…
Refusal behavior in aligned LLMs is often viewed as model-specific, yet we hypothesize it stems from a universal, low-dimensional semantic circuit shared across models. To test this, we introduce Trajectory Replay via Concept-Basis…
Large language models (LLMs) frequently refuse to respond to pseudo-malicious instructions: semantically harmless input queries triggering unnecessary LLM refusals due to conservative safety alignment, significantly impairing user…