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Related papers: Refusal Falls off a Cliff: How Safety Alignment Fa…

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In a plethora of recent work, large language models (LLMs) demonstrated impressive reasoning ability, but many proposed downstream reasoning tasks only focus on final answers. Two fundamental questions persist: 1) how consistent is the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Ziyi Liu , Soumya Sanyal , Isabelle Lee , Yongkang Du , Rahul Gupta , Yang Liu , Jieyu Zhao

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…

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

As vision-language models (VLMs) become increasingly capable, maintaining a balance between safety and usefulness remains a central challenge. Safety mechanisms, while essential, can backfire, causing over-refusal, where models decline…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Kaixuan Ren , Preslav Nakov , Usman Naseem

LLM unlearning is essential for mitigating safety, copyright, and privacy concerns in pre-trained large language models (LLMs). Compared to preference alignment, it offers a more explicit way by removing undesirable knowledge characterized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Junfeng Liao , Qizhou Wang , Shanshan Ye , Xin Yu , Ling Chen , Zhen Fang

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a key method for improving Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet recent evidence suggests it may paradoxically shrink the reasoning boundary rather than…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Phuc Minh Nguyen , Chinh D. La , Duy M. H. Nguyen , Nitesh V. Chawla , Binh T. Nguyen , Khoa D. Doan

Reasoning-based language models have demonstrated strong performance across various domains, with the most notable gains seen in mathematical and coding tasks. Recent research has shown that reasoning also offers significant benefits for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar , Traian Rebedea , Christopher Parisien

A key component of building safe and reliable language models is enabling the models to appropriately refuse to follow certain instructions or answer certain questions. We may want models to output refusal messages for various categories of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Neel Jain , Aditya Shrivastava , Chenyang Zhu , Daben Liu , Alfy Samuel , Ashwinee Panda , Anoop Kumar , Micah Goldblum , Tom Goldstein

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous domains with their impressive performance but still face their challenges. A predominant issue is the propensity for these models to generate non-existent facts, a concern termed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Hanning Zhang , Shizhe Diao , Yong Lin , Yi R. Fung , Qing Lian , Xingyao Wang , Yangyi Chen , Heng Ji , Tong Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have been routinely used to solve various tasks using step-by-step reasoning. However, the structure of intermediate reasoning steps, or thoughts, is rigid and unidirectional, such as chains, trees, or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-30 Sijia Chen , Baochun Li

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is central in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and expectations. However, the process remains susceptible to governance challenges, including evaluator bias,…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Dana Alsagheer , Abdulrahman Kamal , Mohammad Kamal , Weidong Shi

As large language model (LLM) based systems take on high-stakes roles in real-world decision-making, they must reconcile competing instructions from multiple sources (e.g., model developers, users, and tools) within a single prompt context.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Zishuo Zheng , Vidhisha Balachandran , Chan Young Park , Faeze Brahman , Sachin Kumar

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have enabled remarkable performance on complex tasks such as mathematics and coding by generating long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces. In this paper, we identify and systematically analyze a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Zhehao Zhang , Weijie Xu , Shixian Cui , Chandan K. Reddy

Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to exhibit vulnerabilities despite deliberate safety alignment efforts, posing significant risks to users and society. To safeguard against the risk of policy-violating content, system-level moderation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Jingnan Zheng , Xiangtian Ji , Yijun Lu , Chenhang Cui , Weixiang Zhao , Gelei Deng , Zhenkai Liang , An Zhang , Tat-Seng Chua

Large reasoning models (LRMs) that generate long chains of thought now perform well on multi-step math, science, and coding tasks. However, their behavior is still unstable and hard to interpret, and existing analysis tools struggle with…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Xiaoyu Xu , Yulan Pan , Xiaosong Yuan , Zhihong Shen , Minghao Su , Yuanhao Su , Xiaofeng Zhang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Xinpeng Wang , Mingyang Wang , Yihong Liu , Hinrich Schütze , Barbara Plank

As multimodal reasoning improves the overall capabilities of Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs), recent studies have begun to explore safety-oriented reasoning, aiming to enhance safety awareness by analyzing potential safety risks during…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Fenghua Weng , Chaochao Lu , Xia Hu , Wenqi Shao , Wenjie Wang

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.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Li , Chenxiao Yu , Zhiyu Ni , Hao Li , Charith Peris , Chaowei Xiao , Yue Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) have recently achieved impressive results on reasoning benchmarks. Yet, growing evidence shows that these models often generate longer but ineffective chains of thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-02 Jhouben Cuesta-Ramirez , Samuel Beaussant , Mehdi Mounsif

The emergence of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduces a new paradigm of explicit reasoning, enabling remarkable advances yet posing unique risks such as reasoning manipulation and information leakage. To mitigate these risks, current…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jingnan Zheng , Jingjun Xu , Yanzhen Luo , Chenhang Cui , Gelei Deng , Zhenkai Liang , Xiang Wang , An Zhang , Tat-Seng Chua