Related papers: SafeConstellations: Mitigating Over-Refusals in LL…
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…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are prone to generating fluent but incorrect content, known as confabulation, which poses increasing risks in multi-turn or agentic applications where outputs may be reused as context. In this work, we…
Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) are becoming essential as a powerful multimodal backbone for real-world applications. However, recent studies show that audio inputs can more easily elicit harmful responses than text, exposing new risks…
In this paper, we investigate the degree to which fine-tuning in Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively mitigates versus merely conceals undesirable behavior. Through the lens of semi-realistic role-playing exercises designed to elicit…
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…
Large reasoning models (LRMs) with multi-step reasoning capabilities have shown remarkable problem-solving abilities, yet they exhibit concerning safety vulnerabilities that remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate why safety…
Safety-aligned LLMs suffer from two failure modes: jailbreak (answering harmful inputs) and over-refusal (declining benign queries). Existing vector steering methods adjust the magnitude of answer vectors, but this creates a fundamental…
The increasing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into society necessitates robust defenses against vulnerabilities from jailbreaking and adversarial prompts. This project proposes a recursive framework for enhancing the resistance…
This project develops a self correcting framework for large language models (LLMs) that detects and mitigates hallucinations during multi-step reasoning. Rather than relying solely on final answer correctness, our approach leverages fine…
Transformer large language models (LLMs) have sparked admiration for their exceptional performance on tasks that demand intricate multi-step reasoning. Yet, these models simultaneously show failures on surprisingly trivial problems. This…
Achieving robust safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) while preserving their utility remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches often struggle to balance comprehensive safety with fine-grained controllability at the…
Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data. Prior work shows that introducing a small…
Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress, yet their safety alignment remains limited. Typically, current open-source MLLMs rely on the alignment inherited from their language module to avoid harmful…
While LLMs have revolutionized the field of machine learning due to their high performance on a strikingly wide range of problems, they are also known to hallucinate false answers and underperform on less canonical versions of the same…
Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) remain both helpful and harmless poses a significant challenge: fine-tuning on repetitive safety datasets, where unsafe prompts are paired with standard refusal templates, often leads to false…
As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, ensuring their ability to refuse malicious prompts, especially jailbreak attacks, is essential for safe and reliable use. Recently, activation steering has emerged as an…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on several tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. However, especially in high-stakes settings, it becomes vital to know when the output of an LLM…
Language models (LMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes, multi-agent settings, where following instructions and maintaining value alignment are critical. Most alignment research focuses on interactions between a single LM and a single…
Refusal is a key safety behavior in aligned language models, yet the internal mechanisms driving refusals remain opaque. In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study of refusal in instruction-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders to identify…
Ensuring safe and contextually appropriate behaviour in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a critical challenge for real-world deployment. We present \textbf{SafeCtrl-RL}, an inference-time behavioural control framework that enables…