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Related papers: What Matters For Safety Alignment?

200 papers

While the wide adoption of refusal training in large language models (LLMs) has showcased improvements in model safety, recent works have highlighted shortcomings due to the shallow nature of these alignment methods. To this end, the work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Pankayaraj Pathmanathan , Furong Huang

An important aspect in developing language models that interact with humans is aligning their behavior to be useful and unharmful for their human users. This is usually achieved by tuning the model in a way that enhances desired behaviors…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Yotam Wolf , Noam Wies , Oshri Avnery , Yoav Levine , Amnon Shashua

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have significantly improved problem-solving through explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this capability creates a Safety-Helpfulness Paradox: the reasoning process itself can be misused to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Xin Gao , Shaohan Yu , Zerui Chen , Yueming Lyu , Weichen Yu , Guanghao Li , Jiyao Liu , Jianxiong Gao , Jian Liang , Ziwei Liu , Chenyang Si

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 models are becoming pervasive core components in many real-world applications. As a consequence, security alignment represents a critical requirement for their safe deployment. Although previous related works focused…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Marco Arazzi , Vignesh Kumar Kembu , Antonino Nocera

Large language models (LLMs) are now ubiquitous in everyday tools, raising urgent safety concerns about their tendency to generate harmful content. The dominant safety approach -- reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Sathwik Karnik , Somil Bansal

Ensuring Large Language Model (LLM) safety is crucial, yet the lack of a clear understanding about safety mechanisms hinders the development of precise and reliable methodologies for safety intervention across diverse tasks. To better…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Weiwei Qi , Zefeng Wu , Tianhang Zheng , Zikang Zhang , Xiaojun Jia , Zhan Qin , Kui Ren

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by advancing natural language understanding and generation, enabling applications across fields beyond healthcare, software engineering, and conversational systems.…

Although Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have progressed in solving complex problems, their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often contains harmful content that can persist even when the final responses appear safe. We show that this issue…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yichi Zhang , Yue Ding , Jingwen Yang , Tianwei Luo , Dongbai Li , Ranjie Duan , Qiang Liu , Hang Su , Yinpeng Dong , Jun Zhu

The rapid proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) has heightened concerns regarding their exposure to jailbreak attacks, which craft adversarial inputs designed to elicit unsafe content. Although proprietary models such as GPT-4 have…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xiaodong Wu , Xiangman Li , Qi Li , Lingshuang Liu , Jianbing Ni

Current safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) face two key challenges: (1) under-generalization, which leaves models vulnerable to novel jailbreak attacks, and (2) over-alignment, which leads to the excessive refusal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yutao Mou , Yuxiao Luo , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

With the increasing use of large language models (LLMs) in medical decision-support, it is essential to evaluate not only their final answers but also the reliability of their reasoning. Two key risks are Chain-of-Thought (CoT) faithfulness…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Kaiyuan Ji , Yijin Guo , Zicheng Zhang , Xiangyang Zhu , Yuan Tian , Ning Liu , Guangtao Zhai

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

Safety alignment is crucial to ensure that large language models (LLMs) behave in ways that align with human preferences and prevent harmful actions during inference. However, recent studies show that the alignment can be easily compromised…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-01 ShengYun Peng , Pin-Yu Chen , Matthew Hull , Duen Horng Chau

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieved remarkable performance via chain-of-thought (CoT), but recent studies showed that such enhanced reasoning capabilities are at the expense of significantly degraded safety capabilities. In this paper,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jianan Chen , Zhifang Zhang , Shuo He , Linan Yue , Lei Feng , Minling Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread recognition for their superior comprehension and have been deployed across numerous domains. Building on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) ideology, Large Reasoning models (LRMs) further exhibit…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Shiji Zhao , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaojun Jia , Fengxiang Wang , Cheng Wei , Ruoxi Cheng , Yong Xie , Chang Liu , Qing Guo , Jialing Tao , Hui Xue , Xingxing Wei

Small language models (SLMs) have emerged as promising alternatives to large language models (LLMs) due to their low computational demands, enhanced privacy guarantees and comparable performance in specific domains through light-weight…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-03-11 Wenhui Zhang , Huiyu Xu , Zhibo Wang , Zeqing He , Ziqi Zhu , Kui Ren

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 large language models (LLMs) continue to advance in capabilities, ensuring their safety against jailbreak attacks remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel safety alignment approach called Answer-Then-Check, which…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Chentao Cao , Xiaojun Xu , Bo Han , Hang Li

Although LLM-based agents, powered by Large Language Models (LLMs), can use external tools and memory mechanisms to solve complex real-world tasks, they may also introduce critical security vulnerabilities. However, the existing literature…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Hanrong Zhang , Jingyuan Huang , Kai Mei , Yifei Yao , Zhenting Wang , Chenlu Zhan , Hongwei Wang , Yongfeng Zhang