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Large language models are highly capable of answering difficult questions by retrieving, recombining, and attending to information in long contexts. For agentic tasks, an additional capability is required: the preservation of an exact state…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tianxiang Dai , Jonathan Fan

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) often fail to transfer safety capabilities learned in the text modality to semantically equivalent non-text inputs, revealing a persistent multimodal safety gap. We study this gap from a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Jiahe Guo , Xiangran Guo , Jiaxuan Chen , Weixiang Zhao , Yanyan Zhao , Yutai Hou , Qianchao Wang , Dandan Tu , Bing Qin

As large language models (LLMs) become more integrated into societal systems, the risk of them perpetuating and amplifying harmful biases becomes a critical safety concern. Traditional methods for mitigating bias often rely on data…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Shivam Dubey

Existing large language models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Two main approaches have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations: retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Youchao Zhou , Heyan Huang , Yicheng Liu , Rui Dai , Xinglin Wang , Xingchen Zhang , Shumin Shi , Yang Deng

Languages encode distinct abstractions and inductive priors, yet most large language models (LLMs) overlook this diversity by reasoning in a single dominant language. In this work, we introduce x1, a family of reasoning models that can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yangfan Ye , Xiaocheng Feng , Xiachong Feng , Yichong Huang , Zekun Yuan , Lei Huang , Weitao Ma , Qichen Hong , Yunfei Lu , Dandan Tu , Bing Qin

Omni-modal Large Language Models (OLLMs) greatly expand LLMs' multimodal capabilities but also introduce cross-modal safety risks. However, a systematic understanding of vulnerabilities in omni-modal interactions remains lacking. To bridge…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Kun Wang , Zherui Li , Zhenhong Zhou , Yitong Zhang , Yan Mi , Kun Yang , Yiming Zhang , Junhao Dong , Zhongxiang Sun , Qiankun Li , Yang Liu

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed with hierarchical instruction schemes, where certain instructions (e.g., system-level directives) are expected to take precedence over others (e.g., user messages). Yet, we lack a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yilin Geng , Haonan Li , Honglin Mu , Xudong Han , Timothy Baldwin , Omri Abend , Eduard Hovy , Lea Frermann

Activation steering methods are widely used to control large language model (LLM) behavior and are often interpreted as revealing meaningful internal representations. This interpretation assumes that steering directions are identifiable and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Sohan Venkatesh , Ashish Mahendran Kurapath

Large language models often produce unsupported claims. We frame this as a misclassification error at the output boundary, where internally generated completions are emitted as if they were grounded in evidence. This motivates a composite…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Angelina Hintsanen

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have intensified the need to understand and reliably curb their harmful behaviours. We introduce a multidimensional framework for probing and steering harmful content in model internals. For…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-30 McNair Shah , Saleena Angeline , Adhitya Rajendra Kumar , Naitik Chheda , Kevin Zhu , Vasu Sharma , Sean O'Brien , Will Cai

Safety alignment is indispensable for Large Language Models (LLMs) to defend threats from malicious instructions. However, recent researches reveal safety-aligned LLMs prone to reject benign queries due to the exaggerated safety issue,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Zouying Cao , Yifei Yang , Hai Zhao

In this paper, we investigate the degree to which fine-tuning in Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively mitigates versus merely conceals undesirable behavior. Through the lens of semi-realistic role-playing exercises designed to elicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Florin Pop , Judd Rosenblatt , Diogo Schwerz de Lucena , Michael Vaiana

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet they often refuse to answer legitimate queries--a phenomenon known as overrefusal. Overrefusal typically stems from over-conservative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Licheng Pan , Yongqi Tong , Xin Zhang , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Zhixuan Chu

Model steering, which involves intervening on hidden representations at inference time, has emerged as a lightweight alternative to finetuning for precisely controlling large language models. While steering efficacy has been widely studied,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Navita Goyal , Hal Daumé

Current safety evaluations of language models rely on benchmark-based assessments that may miss localized vulnerabilities. We present RepIt, a simple and data-efficient framework for isolating concept-specific representations in LM…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Vincent Siu , Nathan W. Henry , Nicholas Crispino , Yang Liu , Dawn Song , Chenguang Wang

How do multi-turn reasoning systems fail? The expected answer is logical contradiction, in which the system's maintained state becomes unsatisfiable. We show that the dominant mode is instead satisfiable drift, where the internal state…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Sebastien Kawada

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit knowledge disparities across languages. Encouraging LLMs to \textit{abstain} when faced with knowledge gaps is a promising strategy to reduce hallucinations in multilingual settings. Current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yuxi Sun , Aoqi Zuo , Wei Gao , Jing Ma

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Justin Cui , Wei-Lin Chiang , Ion Stoica , Cho-Jui Hsieh

Large language models can represent a variety of personas but typically default to a helpful Assistant identity cultivated during post-training. We investigate the structure of the space of model personas by extracting activation directions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Christina Lu , Jack Gallagher , Jonathan Michala , Kyle Fish , Jack Lindsey

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce fluent but factually incorrect responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. Abstention, where the model chooses not to answer and instead outputs phrases such as "I don't know", is a common…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Vy Nguyen , Ziqi Xu , Jeffrey Chan , Estrid He , Feng Xia , Xiuzhen Zhang