English
Related papers

Related papers: Understanding and Mitigating Over-refusal for Larg…

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) frequently produce false refusals, declining benign requests that contain terms resembling unsafe queries. We address this challenge by introducing two comprehensive benchmarks: the Exaggerated Safety Benchmark…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-19 Shuzhou Yuan , Ercong Nie , Yinuo Sun , Chenxuan Zhao , William LaCroix , Michael Färber

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are vulnerable to a growing array of multimodal jailbreak attacks, necessitating defenses that are both generalizable to novel threats and efficient for practical deployment. Many current strategies fall…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Peichun Hua , Hao Li , Shanghao Shi , Zhiyuan Yu , Ning Zhang

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) induces over-refusals -- where LLMs decline benign requests due to aggressive safety filters. We analyze this phenomenon in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), where both the query intent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Utsav Maskey , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Evaluating aligned large language models' (LLMs) ability to recognize and reject unsafe user requests is crucial for safe, policy-compliant deployments. Existing evaluation efforts, however, face three limitations that we address with…

Large language model (LLM)-powered multi-agent systems (MAS) enable agents to communicate and share information, achieving strong performance on complex tasks. However, this communication also creates an attack surface where malicious…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lingxi Zhang , Guangtao Zheng , Hanjie Chen

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Harethah Abu Shairah , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Bernard Ghanem , George Turkiyyah

This study reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing aligned LLMs predominantly respond to unsafe queries with refusals, which often begin with a fixed set of prefixes…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yangyang Guo , Ziwei Xu , Si Liu , Zhiming Zheng , Mohan Kankanhalli

Jailbreaking attacks can enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to bypass the safeguard and generate harmful content. Existing jailbreaking defense methods have failed to address the fundamental issue that harmful knowledge resides within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Weikai Lu , Ziqian Zeng , Jianwei Wang , Zhengdong Lu , Zelin Chen , Huiping Zhuang , Cen Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated immense utility across various industries. However, as LLMs advance, the risk of harmful outputs increases due to incorrect or malicious instruction prompts. While current methods effectively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Xinyi Zeng , Yuying Shang , Jiawei Chen , Jingyuan Zhang , Yu Tian

As Large Language Models (LLMs) play an increasingly pivotal role in natural language processing applications, their safety concerns become critical areas of NLP research. This paper presents Safety and Over-Defensiveness Evaluation (SODE)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-02 Neeraj Varshney , Pavel Dolin , Agastya Seth , Chitta Baral

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant advancements in performance, various jailbreak attacks have posed growing safety and ethical risks. Malicious users often exploit adversarial context to deceive LLMs, prompting them…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Jinhwa Kim , Ian G. Harris

The recent growth in the use of Large Language Models has made them vulnerable to sophisticated adversarial assaults, manipulative prompts, and encoded malicious inputs. Existing countermeasures frequently necessitate retraining models,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Sheikh Samit Muhaimin , Spyridon Mastorakis

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sadia Asif , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

Refusal refers to the functional behavior enabling safety-aligned language models to reject harmful or unethical prompts. Following the growing scientific interest in mechanistic interpretability, recent work encoded refusal behavior as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Giorgio Piras , Raffaele Mura , Fabio Brau , Luca Oneto , Fabio Roli , Battista Biggio

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) enable interaction over both text and images, but their safety behavior can be driven by unimodal shortcuts instead of true joint intent understanding. We introduce CSR-Bench, a benchmark for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Yuxuan Liu , Yuntian Shi , Kun Wang , Haoting Shen , Kun Yang

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Chujie Zheng , Fan Yin , Hao Zhou , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou , Kai-Wei Chang , Minlie Huang , Nanyun Peng

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Lang Cao

Safety alignment approaches in large language models (LLMs) often lead to the over-refusal of benign queries, significantly diminishing their utility in sensitive scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce FalseReject, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Zhehao Zhang , Weijie Xu , Fanyou Wu , Chandan K. Reddy

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress, yet remain critically vulnerable to adversarial attacks that exploit weaknesses in cross-modal processing. We present a systematic study of multimodal jailbreaks…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Divyanshu Kumar , Shreyas Jena , Nitin Aravind Birur , Tanay Baswa , Sahil Agarwal , Prashanth Harshangi