English
Related papers

Related papers: Steering Externalities: Benign Activation Steering…

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to avoid responding to malicious user inputs. Unfortunately, jailbreak can circumvent safety guardrails, resulting in LLMs generating harmful content and raising concerns about LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Zhenhong Zhou , Haiyang Yu , Xinghua Zhang , Rongwu Xu , Fei Huang , Yongbin Li

While large language models (LLMs) have seen unprecedented advancements in capabilities and applications across a variety of use-cases, safety alignment of these models is still an area of active research. The fragile nature of LLMs, even…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Amrita Bhattacharjee , Shaona Ghosh , Traian Rebedea , Christopher Parisien

Robust alignment guardrails for large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly important with their widespread application. In contrast to previous studies, we demonstrate that inference-time activation interventions can bypass…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Paul Darm , Annalisa Riccardi

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to adapt to evolving safety policies is costly and impractical. Mechanistic interpretability enables inference-time control through latent activation steering, yet its potential for precise,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Shaona Ghosh , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Yftah Ziser , Christopher Parisien

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used in high-stakes, multi-agent settings, where following instructions and maintaining value alignment are critical. Most alignment research focuses on interactions between a single LM and a single…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Maria Chang , Ronny Luss , Miao Liu , Keerthiram Murugesan , Karthikeyan Ramamurthy , Djallel Bouneffouf

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate inconsistent responses when prompted with semantically equivalent paraphrased inputs. Recently, activation steering, a technique that modulates LLMs' behaviours by adjusting their latent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Jingyuan Yang , Rongjun Li , Weixuan Wang , Ziyu Zhou , Zhiyong Feng , Wei Peng

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite advanced general capabilities, still suffer from numerous safety risks, especially jailbreak attacks that bypass safety protocols. Understanding these vulnerabilities through black-box jailbreak…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Yao Huang , Yitong Sun , Shouwei Ruan , Yichi Zhang , Yinpeng Dong , Xingxing Wei

Recent advances in automated theorem proving use Large Language Models (LLMs) to translate informal mathematical statements into formal proofs. However, informal cues are often ambiguous or lack strict logical structure, making it hard for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Shashank Kirtania , Arun Iyer

Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Uzay Macar , Li Yang , Atticus Wang , Peter Wallich , Emmanuel Ameisen , Jack Lindsey

Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive proficiency in various tasks, they present potential safety risks, such as `jailbreaks', where malicious inputs can coerce LLMs into generating harmful content bypassing safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Isack Lee , Haebin Seong

As vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in open-world scenarios, they can be easily induced by visual jailbreak attacks to generate harmful content, posing serious risks to model safety and trustworthy usage. Recent…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Xingyu Zhu , Beier Zhu , Shuo Wang , Junfeng Fang , Kesen Zhao , Hanwang Zhang , Xiangnan He

The integration of additional modalities increases the susceptibility of large vision-language models (LVLMs) to safety risks, such as jailbreak attacks, compared to their language-only counterparts. While existing research primarily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Yilei Jiang , Xinyan Gao , Tianshuo Peng , Yingshui Tan , Xiaoyong Zhu , Bo Zheng , Xiangyu Yue

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained widespread adoption across various domains, including chatbots and auto-task completion agents. However, these models are susceptible to safety vulnerabilities such as jailbreaking, prompt injection,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-09-10 Divyanshu Kumar , Anurakt Kumar , Sahil Agarwal , Prashanth Harshangi

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to be vulnerable to jailbreaking attacks where adversarial prompts are designed to elicit harmful responses. While existing defenses effectively mitigate single-turn attacks by detecting and filtering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Hanjiang Hu , Alexander Robey , Changliu Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) suffer from a range of vulnerabilities that allow malicious users to solicit undesirable responses through manipulation of the input text. These so-called jailbreak prompts are designed to trick the LLM into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 John Hawkins , Aditya Pramar , Rodney Beard , Rohitash Chandra

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire deceptive behaviors through backdoor attacks, where the model executes prohibited actions whenever secret triggers appear in the input. Existing safety training methods largely fail to address this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Guangyu Shen , Siyuan Cheng , Xiangzhe Xu , Yuan Zhou , Hanxi Guo , Zhuo Zhang , Xiangyu Zhang

Conversational large language models are trained to refuse to answer harmful questions. However, emergent jailbreaking techniques can still elicit unsafe outputs, presenting an ongoing challenge for model alignment. To better understand how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Sarah Ball , Frauke Kreuter , Nina Panickssery

Large language model (LLM) safety is a critical issue, with numerous studies employing red team testing to enhance model security. Among these, jailbreak methods explore potential vulnerabilities by crafting malicious prompts that induce…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Honglin Mu , Han He , Yuxin Zhou , Yunlong Feng , Yang Xu , Libo Qin , Xiaoming Shi , Zeming Liu , Xudong Han , Qi Shi , Qingfu Zhu , Wanxiang Che

Large Language Models(LLMs) have been successful in numerous fields. Alignment has usually been applied to prevent them from harmful purposes. However, aligned LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that deliberately mislead them into…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Shang Liu , Hanyu Pei , Zeyan Liu

Agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities across a wide range of tasks. However, deploying LLM-based agents in high-stakes domains comes with significant safety and ethical risks. Unethical behavior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Baixiang Huang , Zhen Tan , Haoran Wang , Zijie Liu , Dawei Li , Ali Payani , Huan Liu , Tianlong Chen , Kai Shu