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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language tasks, but their safety and morality remain contentious due to their training on internet text corpora. To address these concerns, alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Mohammad Bahrami Karkevandi , Nishant Vishwamitra , Peyman Najafirad

Current Large Language Models (LLMs), even those tuned for safety and alignment, are susceptible to jailbreaking. Some have found that just further fine-tuning an aligned model with benign data (i.e., data without harmful content)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Luxi He , Mengzhou Xia , Peter Henderson

Researchers have been studying approaches to steer the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) and build personalized LLMs tailored for various applications. While fine-tuning seems to be a direct solution, it requires substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Yuanpu Cao , Tianrong Zhang , Bochuan Cao , Ziyi Yin , Lu Lin , Fenglong Ma , Jinghui Chen

Most jailbreak techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily rely on prompt modifications, including paraphrasing, obfuscation, or conversational strategies. Meanwhile, abliteration techniques (also known as targeted ablations of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Maël Jenny , Jérémie Dentan , Sonia Vanier , Michaël Krajecki

The open-sourcing of large language models (LLMs) accelerates application development, innovation, and scientific progress. This includes both base models, which are pre-trained on extensive datasets without alignment, and aligned models,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Xiao Wang , Tianze Chen , Xianjun Yang , Qi Zhang , Xun Zhao , Dahua Lin

Vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong multimodal capabilities but have been found to be more susceptible to generating harmful content compared to their backbone large language models (LLMs). Our investigation reveals that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-29 Qing Li , Jiahui Geng , Zongxiong Chen , Kun Song , Lei Ma , Fakhri Karray

A popular approach to post-training control of large language models (LLMs) is the steering of intermediate latent representations. Namely, identify a well-chosen direction depending on the task at hand and perturbs representations along…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Magamed Taimeskhanov , Samuel Vaiter , Damien Garreau

Precise control over language model generation is vital for ensuring both safety and reliability. Although prompt engineering and steering are commonly used to intervene in model behaviors, the vast number of parameters in models often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Mengru Wang , Ziwen Xu , Shengyu Mao , Shumin Deng , Zhaopeng Tu , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel in vision-language tasks but also pose significant risks of generating harmful content, particularly through jailbreak attacks. Jailbreak attacks refer to intentional manipulations that bypass…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Yi Nian , Shenzhe Zhu , Yuehan Qin , Li Li , Ziyi Wang , Chaowei Xiao , Yue Zhao

In this study, we disclose a worrying new vulnerability in Large Language Models (LLMs), which we term \textbf{involuntary jailbreak}. Unlike existing jailbreak attacks, this weakness is distinct in that it does not involve a specific…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Yangyang Guo , Yangyan Li , Mohan Kankanhalli

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain susceptible to jailbreak exploits that bypass safety filters and induce harmful or unethical behavior. This work presents a systematic taxonomy of existing jailbreak defenses across prompt-level,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Ryan Wong , Hosea David Yu Fei Ng , Dhananjai Sharma , Glenn Jun Jie Ng , Kavishvaran Srinivasan

This paper investigates privacy jailbreaking in LLMs via steering, focusing on whether manipulating activations can bypass LLM alignment and alter response behaviors to privacy related queries (e.g., a certain public figure's sexual…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Krishna Kanth Nakka , Xue Jiang , Dmitrii Usynin , Xuebing Zhou

Safety alignment is a key requirement for building reliable Artificial General Intelligence. Despite significant advances in safety alignment, we observe that minor latent shifts can still trigger unsafe responses in aligned models. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tianle Gu , Kexin Huang , Zongqi Wang , Yixu Wang , Jie Li , Yuanqi Yao , Yang Yao , Yujiu Yang , Yan Teng , Yingchun Wang

The recent surge in jailbreaking attacks has revealed significant vulnerabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) when exposed to malicious inputs. While various defense strategies have been proposed to mitigate these threats, there has…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-24 Tianlong Li , Zhenghua Wang , Wenhao Liu , Muling Wu , Shihan Dou , Changze Lv , Xiaohua Wang , Xiaoqing Zheng , Xuanjing Huang

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly serve as automated evaluators, yet they suffer from "self-preference bias": a tendency to favor their own outputs over those of other models. This bias undermines fairness and reliability in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-05 Dani Roytburg , Matthew Bozoukov , Matthew Nguyen , Jou Barzdukas , Simon Fu , Narmeen Oozeer

Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without additional training. However, most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tuc Nguyen , Thai Le

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks. Nevertheless, they still pose notable safety risks due to potential misuse for malicious purposes. Jailbreaking, which seeks to induce models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Hua Tang , Lingyong Yan , Yukun Zhao , Shuaiqiang Wang , Jizhou Huang , Dawei Yin

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

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has prompted increasing interest in their use as in-context learning agents. At the core of agentic behavior is the capacity for exploration, or the ability to actively gather information about the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-14 Nate Rahn , Pierluca D'Oro , Marc G. Bellemare

Large Language Models (LLMs) rapidly reshape modern life, advancing fields from healthcare to education and beyond. However, alongside their remarkable capabilities lies a significant threat: the susceptibility of these models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Michael Fire , Yitzhak Elbazis , Adi Wasenstein , Lior Rokach