Related papers: LLMs Can Unlearn Refusal with Only 1,000 Benign Sa…

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,…

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…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is primarily evaluated under open-ended generation, where models can mitigate risk by refusing to respond. In contrast, many real-world applications place LLMs in structured decision-making…

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…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs), particularly for cybersecurity tasks, primarily focuses on preventing misuse. While this approach reduces direct harm, it obscures a complementary failure mode: denial of assistance to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) require careful safety alignment to prevent malicious outputs. While significant research focuses on mitigating harmful content generation, the enhanced safety often come with the side effect of over-refusal,…

This study addresses a critical gap in safety tuning practices for Large Language Models (LLMs) by identifying and tackling a refusal position bias within safety tuning data, which compromises the models' ability to appropriately refuse…

Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction-tuned models, Gemma-2-2B-IT and…

Refusal behavior in large language models (LLMs) enables them to decline responding to harmful, unethical, or inappropriate prompts, ensuring alignment with ethical standards. This paper investigates refusal behavior across six LLMs from…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) with multi-step reasoning capabilities have shown remarkable problem-solving abilities, yet they exhibit concerning safety vulnerabilities that remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate why safety…

Refusals - instances where large language models (LLMs) decline or fail to fully execute user instructions - are crucial for both AI safety and AI capabilities and the reduction of hallucinations in particular. These behaviors are learned…

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,…

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 (LLMs) commonly rely on explicit refusal prefixes for safety, making them vulnerable to prefix injection attacks. We introduce HumorReject, a novel data-driven approach that reimagines LLM safety by decoupling it from…

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…

Refusal is a key safety behavior in aligned language models, yet the internal mechanisms driving refusals remain opaque. In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study of refusal in instruction-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders to identify…

Large language models (LLMs) possess strong semantic understanding, driving significant progress in data mining applications. This is further enhanced by large reasoning models (LRMs), which provide explicit multi-step reasoning traces. On…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have become the cornerstone of today's generative AI ecosystem, sparking intense competition among tech giants and startups. In particular, an MLLM generates a text response given a prompt consisting…

Large language models (LLMs), despite possessing latent safety understanding from their vast pretraining data, remain vulnerable to generating harmful content and exhibit issues such as over-refusal and utility degradation after safety…

We study how to perform unlearning, i.e. forgetting undesirable misbehaviors, on large language models (LLMs). We show at least three scenarios of aligning LLMs with human preferences can benefit from unlearning: (1) removing harmful…