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Prepending model inputs with safety prompts is a common practice for safeguarding large language models (LLMs) against queries with harmful intents. However, the underlying working mechanisms of safety prompts have not been unraveled yet,…
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…
Safety alignment instills in Large Language Models (LLMs) a critical capacity to refuse malicious requests. Prior works have modeled this refusal mechanism as a single linear direction in the activation space. We posit that this is an…
Accurately predicting opponents' behavior from interactions is a fundamental capability for large language model (LLM)-based agents in multi-agent and game-theoretic environments. Existing approaches often entangle opponent modeling with…
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…
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…
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,…
Recent work has shown that language models' refusal behavior is primarily encoded in a single direction in their latent space, making it vulnerable to targeted attacks. Although Latent Adversarial Training (LAT) attempts to improve…
Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) sometimes falsely refuse pseudo-harmful prompts, like "how to kill a mosquito," which are actually harmless. Frequent false refusals not only frustrate users but also provoke a public backlash…
We identify a structural weakness in current large language model (LLM) alignment: modern refusal mechanisms are fail-open. While existing approaches encode refusal behaviors across multiple latent features, suppressing a single dominant…
We propose affine concept editing (ACE) as an approach for steering language models' behavior by intervening directly in activations. We begin with an affine decomposition of model activation vectors and show that prior methods for steering…
While large language models (LLMs) have increasingly been applied to hate speech detoxification, the prompts often trigger safety alerts, causing LLMs to refuse the task. In this study, we systematically investigate false refusal behavior…
The rapid growth of large language models has spurred significant interest in model compression as a means to enhance their accessibility and practicality. While extensive research has explored model compression through the lens of safety,…
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed the way we access information. These models are often tuned to refuse to comply with requests that are considered harmful and to produce responses that better align with the preferences of those…
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,…
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at multimodal perception and understanding, yet their tendency to generate hallucinated or inaccurate responses undermines their trustworthiness. Existing methods have largely overlooked the…
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…
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) exhibit strong conversational abilities but often generate falsehoods. Prior work suggests that the truthfulness of simple propositions can be represented as a single linear direction in a model's internal…
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…