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This work introduces a novel framework for evaluating LLMs' capacity to balance instruction-following with critical reasoning when presented with multiple-choice questions containing no valid answers. Through systematic evaluation across…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Gracjan Góral , Emilia Wiśnios , Piotr Sankowski , Paweł Budzianowski

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) generate text via iterative masked-token denoising, enabling mask-parallel decoding and distinct controllability and efficiency tradeoffs from autoregressive LLMs. Yet, efficient representation-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Adi Shnaidman , Erin Feiglin , Osher Yaari , Efrat Mentel , Amit Levi , Raz Lapid

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in various tasks but often fail to handle queries that exceed their knowledge and capabilities, leading to incorrect or fabricated responses. This paper addresses the need for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Wenbo Zhang , Zihang Xu , Hengrui Cai

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives and personalized. However, LLM personalization might also increase unintended side effects. Recent work suggests that persona prompting can lead models to falsely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco , Paul Röttger , Nino Scherrer , Emanuele Borgonovo , Elmar Plischke , Dirk Hovy

The field of large language models (LLMs) has grown rapidly in recent years, driven by the desire for better efficiency, interpretability, and safe use. Building on the novel approach of "activation engineering," this study explores…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Rumi Allbert , James K. Wiles , Vlad Grankovsky

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used across sectors, yet their alignment with International Humanitarian Law (IHL) is not well understood. This study evaluates eight leading LLMs on their ability to refuse prompts that explicitly…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-06-10 John Mavi , Diana Teodora Găitan , Sergio Coronado

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zhiyu Xue , Zimo Qi , Guangliang Liu , Bocheng Chen , Ramtin Pedarsani

We introduce Refusal Steering, an inference-time method to exercise fine-grained control over Large Language Models refusal behaviour on politically sensitive topics without retraining. We replace fragile pattern-based refusal detection…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Iker García-Ferrero , David Montero , Roman Orus

Inasmuch as the removal of refusal behavior from instruction-tuned language models by directional abliteration requires the extraction of refusal-mediating directions from the residual stream activation space, and inasmuch as the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Valentin Petrov

Frontier large language models are increasingly deployed as orchestration backbones for biological research workflows, yet no shared evidence base exists for comparing their refusal behaviour on legitimate research prompts. RefusalBench,…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Lukas Weidener , Marko Brkić , Mihailo Jovanović , Emre Ulgac , Aakaash Meduri

Steering vectors are a lightweight method to control language model behavior by adding a learned bias to the activations at inference time. Although steering demonstrates promising performance, recent work shows that it can be unreliable or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Joschka Braun , Carsten Eickhoff , David Krueger , Seyed Ali Bahrainian , Dmitrii Krasheninnikov

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 guardrails in large language models(LLMs) are developed to prevent malicious users from generating toxic content at a large scale. However, these measures can inadvertently introduce or reflect new biases, as LLMs may refuse to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Adel Khorramrouz , Sharon Levy

As large language models (LLMs) evolve in complexity and capability, the efficacy of less widely deployed alignment techniques are uncertain. Building on previous work on activation steering and contrastive activation addition (CAA), this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-17 Sheikh Abdur Raheem Ali , Justin Xu , Ivory Yang , Jasmine Xinze Li , Ayse Arslan , Clark Benham

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Kyuri Im , Shuzhou Yuan , Michael Färber

Abstention, the refusal of large language models (LLMs) to provide an answer, is increasingly recognized for its potential to mitigate hallucinations and enhance safety in LLM systems. In this survey, we introduce a framework to examine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Bingbing Wen , Jihan Yao , Shangbin Feng , Chenjun Xu , Yulia Tsvetkov , Bill Howe , Lucy Lu Wang

We localize the policy routing mechanism in alignment-trained language models. An intermediate-layer attention gate reads detected content and triggers deeper amplifier heads that boost the signal toward refusal. In smaller models the gate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Gregory N. Frank

Mainstream creativity support design prioritizes compliant AI for seamless writing interactions, but concerns over inappropriate AI reliance highlight the need for designs fostering reflection on balanced AI and non-AI resource use.…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Hua Xuan Qin , Guangzhi Zhu , Mingming Fan , Pan Hui

Large language models (LLMs) require precise behavior control for safe and effective deployment across diverse applications. Activation steering offers a promising approach for LLMs' behavioral control. We focus on the question of how…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Tetiana Bas , Krystian Novak

Large language models (LLMs) often respond confidently to questions even when they lack the necessary information, leading to hallucinated answers. In this work, we study the problem of (un)answerability detection, focusing on extractive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Maor Juliet Lavi , Tova Milo , Mor Geva