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Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet their safety mechanisms remain susceptible to adversarial attacks that exploit cognitive biases -- systematic deviations from rational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Xikang Yang , Biyu Zhou , Xuehai Tang , Jizhong Han , Songlin Hu

Jailbreaking -- bypassing built-in safety mechanisms in AI models -- has traditionally required complex technical procedures or specialized human expertise. In this study, we show that the persuasive capabilities of large reasoning models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Thilo Hagendorff , Erik Derner , Nuria Oliver

Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly transitioning from conversational assistants to autonomous agents embedded in critical organizational functions, including Security Operations Centers (SOCs), financial systems, and infrastructure…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-06 Giuseppe Canale , Kashyap Thimmaraju

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed, ensuring their safe use is paramount. Jailbreaking, adversarial prompts that bypass model alignment to trigger harmful outputs, present significant risks, with existing studies…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Yuan Xin , Dingfan Chen , Linyi Yang , Michael Backes , Xiao Zhang

In this paper, we investigate the safety mechanisms of instruction fine-tuned large language models (LLMs). We discover that re-weighting MLP neurons can significantly compromise a model's safety, especially for MLPs in end-of-sentence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Yifan Luo , Zhennan Zhou , Meitan Wang , Bin Dong

Large language models (LLMs) can be prompted with specific styles (e.g., formatting responses as lists), including in malicious queries. Prior jailbreak research mainly augments these queries with additional string transformations to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Yuxin Xiao , Sana Tonekaboni , Walter Gerych , Vinith Suriyakumar , Marzyeh Ghassemi

Ensuring the safety and harmlessness of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become equally critical as their performance in applications. However, existing safety alignment methods typically suffer from safety-performance trade-offs and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Yichi Zhang , Siyuan Zhang , Yao Huang , Zeyu Xia , Zhengwei Fang , Xiao Yang , Ranjie Duan , Dong Yan , Yinpeng Dong , Jun Zhu

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are swiftly advancing in architecture and capability, and as they integrate more deeply into complex systems, the urgency to scrutinize their security properties grows. This paper surveys research in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-18 Erfan Shayegani , Md Abdullah Al Mamun , Yu Fu , Pedram Zaree , Yue Dong , Nael Abu-Ghazaleh

In the realm of black-box jailbreak attacks on large language models (LLMs), the feasibility of constructing a narrow safety proxy, a lightweight model designed to predict the attack success rate (ASR) of adversarial prompts, remains…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Tianyu Zhang , Zihang Xi , Jingyu Hua , Sheng Zhong

This position paper proposes a novel approach to advancing NLP security by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as engines for generating diverse adversarial attacks. Building upon recent work demonstrating LLMs' effectiveness in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-25 Sudarshan Srinivasan , Maria Mahbub , Amir Sadovnik

We present MultiBreak, a scalable and diverse multi-turn jailbreak benchmark to evaluate large language model (LLM) safety. Multi-turn jailbreaks mimic natural conversational settings, making them easier to bypass safety-aligned LLM than…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jialin Song , Xiaodong Liu , Weiwei Yang , Wuyang Chen , Mingqian Feng , Xuekai Zhu , Jianfeng Gao

Large Language Models have shown impressive generative capabilities across diverse tasks, but their safety remains a critical concern. Existing post-training alignment methods, such as SFT and RLHF, reduce harmful outputs yet leave LLMs…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Zhengyue Zhao , Yingzi Ma , Somesh Jha , Marco Pavone , Patrick McDaniel , Chaowei Xiao

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) rely on attention-based retrieval of safety instructions to maintain alignment during generation. Existing attacks typically optimize image perturbations to maximize harmful output likelihood, but suffer…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Jingru Li , Wei Ren , Tianqing Zhu

Warning: This paper contains examples of harmful language, and reader discretion is recommended. The increasing open release of powerful large language models (LLMs) has facilitated the development of downstream applications by reducing the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Xianjun Yang , Xiao Wang , Qi Zhang , Linda Petzold , William Yang Wang , Xun Zhao , Dahua Lin

Large Language Models (LLMs), which bridge the gap between human language understanding and complex problem-solving, achieve state-of-the-art performance on several NLP tasks, particularly in few-shot and zero-shot settings. Despite the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Shuai Zhao , Meihuizi Jia , Zhongliang Guo , Leilei Gan , Xiaoyu Xu , Xiaobao Wu , Jie Fu , Yichao Feng , Fengjun Pan , Luu Anh Tuan

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their exceptional natural language processing capabilities. However, concerns about their trustworthiness remain unresolved, particularly in addressing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Yue Huang , Jingyu Tang , Dongping Chen , Bingda Tang , Yao Wan , Lichao Sun , Philip S. Yu , Xiangliang Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing but remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, especially multi-turn jailbreaks that distribute malicious intent across benign exchanges and bypass alignment…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Javad Rafiei Asl , Sidhant Narula , Mohammad Ghasemigol , Eduardo Blanco , Daniel Takabi

Despite significant progress in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain susceptible to jailbreak attacks. Existing defense mechanisms have not fully deleted harmful knowledge in LLMs, which allows such attacks to bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zesheng Shi , Yucheng Zhou , Jing Li

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is a common practice to adapt generalist models to specialized domains. However, recent studies show that fine-tuning can erode safety alignment, causing LLMs to respond to harmful or unethical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Aladin Djuhera , Swanand Ravindra Kadhe , Farhan Ahmed , Syed Zawad , Holger Boche