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Despite investments in improving model safety, studies show that misaligned capabilities remain latent in safety-tuned models. In this work, we shed light on the mechanics of this phenomenon. First, we show that even when model generations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Asma Ghandeharioun , Ann Yuan , Marius Guerard , Emily Reif , Michael A. Lepori , Lucas Dixon

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely applied in decision making, but their deployment is threatened by jailbreak attacks, where adversarial users manipulate model behavior to bypass safety measures. Existing defense mechanisms, such as…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Yi Wang , Fenghua Weng , Sibei Yang , Zhan Qin , Minlie Huang , Wenjie Wang

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan

Extensive work has been devoted to improving the safety mechanism of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, LLMs still tend to generate harmful responses when faced with malicious instructions, a phenomenon referred to as "Jailbreak…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-26 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Ming Ma , Yuhan Chen , Bing Qin

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for clinical reasoning tasks, which inherently require eliciting calibrated probabilistic beliefs based on available evidence. However, real-world clinical data are frequently…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Yuta Kobayashi , Vincent Jeanselme , Shalmali Joshi

Jailbreak attacks, where harmful prompts bypass generative models' built-in safety, raise serious concerns about model vulnerability. While many defense methods have been proposed, the trade-offs between safety and helpfulness, and their…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Zhuohang Long , Siyuan Wang , Shujun Liu , Yuhang Lai , Xuanjing Huang , Zhongyu Wei

Recent explorations with commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that non-expert users can jailbreak LLMs by simply manipulating their prompts; resulting in degenerate output behavior, privacy and security breaches, offensive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-28 Abhinav Rao , Sachin Vashistha , Atharva Naik , Somak Aditya , Monojit Choudhury

Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on code with security vulnerabilities can result in misaligned and unsafe behaviors across broad domains. These results prompted concerns about the emergence of harmful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Jeremiah Giordani

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great potential as general-purpose AI assistants in various domains. To meet the requirements of different applications, LLMs are often customized by further fine-tuning. However, the powerful…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Xin Zhou , Yi Lu , Ruotian Ma , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Recent studies reveal that vision-language models (VLMs) become more susceptible to harmful requests and jailbreak attacks after integrating the vision modality, exhibiting greater vulnerability than their text-only LLM backbones. To…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Xiaohan Zou , Jian Kang , George Kesidis , Lu Lin

The widespread deployment of large language models (LLMs) has raised growing concerns about their misuse risks and associated safety issues. While prior studies have examined the safety of LLMs in general usage, code generation, and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-05 Haoran Gu , Handing Wang , Yi Mei , Mengjie Zhang , Yaochu Jin

Deploying LLMs in real-world applications requires controllable output that satisfies multiple desiderata at the same time. While existing work extensively addresses LLM steering for a single behavior, \textit{compositional steering} --…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Gorjan Radevski , Kiril Gashteovski , Giwon Hong , Carolin Lawrence , Goran Glavaš

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 emerged as powerful tools for addressing a wide range of general inquiries and tasks. Despite this, fine-tuning aligned LLMs on smaller, domain-specific datasets, critical to adapting them to specialized…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Guanlin Li , Kangjie Chen , Shangwei Guo , Jie Zhang , Han Qiu , Chao Zhang , Guoyin Wang , Tianwei Zhang , Jiwei Li

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have made significant progress, yet their safety alignment remains limited. Typically, current open-source MLLMs rely on the alignment inherited from their language module to avoid harmful…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yanbo Wang , Jiyang Guan , Jian Liang , Ran He

While large language models (LLMs) present significant potential for supporting numerous real-world applications and delivering positive social impacts, they still face significant challenges in terms of the inherent risk of privacy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Huandong Wang , Wenjie Fu , Yingzhou Tang , Zhilong Chen , Yuxi Huang , Jinghua Piao , Chen Gao , Fengli Xu , Tao Jiang , Yong Li

Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for downstream use cases often involves the customization of pre-trained LLMs through further fine-tuning. Meta's open release of Llama models and OpenAI's APIs for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 Turbo on custom…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Xiangyu Qi , Yi Zeng , Tinghao Xie , Pin-Yu Chen , Ruoxi Jia , Prateek Mittal , Peter Henderson

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) remains vulnerable, as their initial behavior can be easily jailbroken by even relatively simple attacks. Since infilling a fixed template between the input instruction and initial model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Chak Tou Leong , Qingyu Yin , Jian Wang , Wenjie Li

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