Related papers: Safe Transformer: An Explicit Safety Bit For Inter…
The attention mechanism in its standard implementation contains extraneous rotational degrees of freedom that are carried through computation but do not affect model activations or outputs. We introduce a simple symmetry-breaking protocol…
When deploying machine learning models in high-stakes robotics applications, the ability to detect unsafe situations is crucial. Early warning systems can provide alerts when an unsafe situation is imminent (in the absence of corrective…
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…
The rapid proliferation of open-source language models significantly increases the risks of downstream backdoor attacks. These backdoors can introduce dangerous behaviours during model deployment and can evade detection by conventional…
Safety alignment in language models operates through two mechanistically distinct systems: refusal neurons that gate whether harmful knowledge is expressed, and concept neurons that encode the harmful knowledge itself. By targeting a single…
Transformer has been successfully used in practical applications, such as ChatGPT, due to its powerful advantages. However, users' input is leaked to the model provider during the service. With people's attention to privacy,…
The ability to learn and execute optimal control policies safely is critical to realization of complex autonomy, especially where task restarts are not available and/or the systems are safety-critical. Safety requirements are often…
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,…
Current safety alignment of foundation models largely follows a \emph{one-size-fits-all} paradigm, applying the same refusal policy across users and contexts. As a result, models may refuse requests that are unsafe for general users but…
Vision transformer (ViT) models, when coupled with interpretation models, are regarded as secure and challenging to deceive, making them well-suited for security-critical domains such as medical applications, autonomous vehicles, drones,…
Control barrier certificates have proven effective in formally guaranteeing the safety of the control systems. However, designing a control barrier certificate is a time-consuming and computationally expensive endeavor that requires expert…
Large Language Models' safety-aligned behaviors, such as refusing harmful queries, can be represented by linear directions in activation space. Previous research modeled safety behavior with a single direction, limiting mechanistic…
Nowadays, many control systems are networked and embed communication and computation capabilities. Such control architectures are prone to cyber attacks on the cyberinfrastructure. Consequently, there is an impellent need to develop…
Safety alignment is an essential research topic for real-world AI applications. Despite the multifaceted nature of safety and trustworthiness in AI, current safety alignment methods often focus on a comprehensive notion of safety. By…
Learning-based quadruped controllers achieve impressive agility but typically lack formal safety guarantees under model uncertainty, perception noise, and unstructured contact conditions. We introduce SafeMind, a differentiable stochastic…
Large (vision-)language models exhibit remarkable capability but remain highly susceptible to jailbreaking. Existing safety training approaches aim to have the model learn a refusal boundary between safe and unsafe, based on the user's…
Automated bias detection in news text is heavily used to support journalistic analysis and media accountability, yet little is known about how bias detection models arrive at their decisions or why they fail. In this work, we present a…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to be effective in many scenarios. However, it typically requires the exploration of a sufficiently large number of state-action pairs, some of which may be unsafe. Consequently, its application to…
In recent years, advanced model-based and data-driven control methods are unlocking the potential of complex robotics systems, and we can expect this trend to continue at an exponential rate in the near future. However, ensuring safety with…
Safety benchmark scores provide incomplete evidence of deployment readiness: aligned language models often adhere to rigid rules even when a situational update flips which action is safe. We term this failure brittle safety. To diagnose it,…