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Emoticons are widely used in digital communication to convey affective intent, yet their safety implications for Large Language Models (LLMs) remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we identify emoticon semantic confusion, a vulnerability…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Weipeng Jiang , Xiaoyu Zhang , Juan Zhai , Shiqing Ma , Chao Shen , Yang Liu

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 often struggle to recognize their knowledge limits in closed-book question answering, leading to confident hallucinations. While decomposed prompting is typically used to improve accuracy, we investigate its impact on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Dhruv Madhwal , Lyuxin David Zhang , Dan Roth , Tomer Wolfson , Vivek Gupta

In this paper, we present a challenging code reasoning task: vulnerability detection. Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising results in natural-language and math reasoning, but state-of-the-art (SOTA) models reported only 54.5%…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-01-09 Benjamin Steenhoek , Md Mahbubur Rahman , Monoshi Kumar Roy , Mirza Sanjida Alam , Hengbo Tong , Swarna Das , Earl T. Barr , Wei Le

Safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) still show two dominant failure modes: they are easily jailbroken, or they over-refuse harmless inputs that contain sensitive surface signals. We trace both to a common cause: current models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Rui Wu , Yihao Quan , Zeru Shi , Zhenting Wang , Yanshu Li , Ruixiang Tang

Large Language Models (LLMs) frequently prioritize conflicting in-context information over pre-existing parametric memory, a phenomenon often termed sycophancy or compliance. However, the mechanistic realization of this behavior remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Long Zhang , Fangwei Lin

Benchmark scores for Large Language Models (LLMs) can be inflated by memorization of test items or near duplicates. We present a simple, protocol that probes generalization by re-evaluating models on paraphrased versions of benchmark…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Juan Miguel Navarro Carranza

The literature on how large language models handle conflict between their training knowledge and a contradicting document presents a persistent empirical contradiction: some studies find models stubbornly retain their trained answers,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Pruthvinath Jeripity Venkata

The remarkable advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have not rendered them immune to challenges, particularly in the context of handling deceptive information in prompts, thus producing hallucinated responses under such…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Yusu Qian , Haotian Zhang , Yinfei Yang , Zhe Gan

Current safety evaluations of large language models rely on single-shot testing, implicitly assuming that model responses are deterministic and representative of the model's safety alignment. We challenge this assumption by investigating…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-17 Erik Larsen

Large language models (LLMs) introduce new security risks, but there are few comprehensive evaluation suites to measure and reduce these risks. We present BenchmarkName, a novel benchmark to quantify LLM security risks and capabilities. We…

Traditional benchmarks for large language models (LLMs), such as HELM and AIR-BENCH, primarily assess safety risk through breadth-oriented evaluation across diverse tasks. However, real-world deployment often exposes a different class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Keita Broadwater

Safety benchmarks are routinely treated as evidence about how a language model will behave once deployed, but this inference is fragile if behavior depends on whether a prompt looks like an evaluation. We define evaluation-context…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Florian A. D. Burnat , Brittany I. Davidson

Large language models (LLMs) often demonstrate strong safety performance in high-resource languages, yet exhibit severe vulnerabilities when queried in low-resource languages. We attribute this gap to a mismatch between language-agnostic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Junxiao Yang , Haoran Liu , Jinzhe Tu , Jiale Cheng , Zhexin Zhang , Shiyao Cui , Jiaqi Weng , Jialing Tao , Hui Xue , Hongning Wang , Han Qiu , Minlie Huang

We investigate the internal behavior of Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) when they generate factually incorrect text. We propose modeling factual queries as constraint satisfaction problems and use this framework to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Mert Yuksekgonul , Varun Chandrasekaran , Erik Jones , Suriya Gunasekar , Ranjita Naik , Hamid Palangi , Ece Kamar , Besmira Nushi

Intrinsic evaluation metrics for conditional language models, such as perplexity or bits-per-character, are widely used in both mono- and multilingual settings. These metrics are rather straightforward to use and compare in monolingual…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Wessel Poelman , Miryam de Lhoneux

Prompt sensitivity, referring to the phenomenon where paraphrasing (i.e., repeating something written or spoken using different words) leads to significant changes in large language model (LLM) performance, has been widely accepted as a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Andong Hua , Kenan Tang , Chenhe Gu , Jindong Gu , Eric Wong , Yao Qin

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Zachary Coalson , Beth Sohler , Aiden Gabriel , Sanghyun Hong

The staggering pace with which the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are increasing, as measured by a range of commonly used natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, raises many questions regarding what "understanding"…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-19 Xenia Ohmer , Elia Bruni , Dieuwke Hupkes

Despite the remarkable proficiency of \textit{Large Reasoning Models} (LRMs) in handling complex reasoning tasks, their reliability in safety-critical scenarios remains uncertain. Existing evaluations primarily assess response-level safety,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Baihui Zheng , Boren Zheng , Kerui Cao , Yingshui Tan , Zhendong Liu , Weixun Wang , Jiaheng Liu , Jian Yang , Wenbo Su , Xiaoyong Zhu , Bo Zheng , Kaifu Zhang