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LLMs(Large Language Models) nowadays have widespread adoption as a tool for solving issues across various domain/tasks. These models since are susceptible to produce harmful or toxic results, inference-time adversarial attacks, therefore…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Sachin Kumar

Safety-aligned language models often refuse cybersecurity requests whose wording resembles misuse, even when the task is authorized and defensive. This makes security evaluation ambiguous: a failed answer may reflect missing capability or…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Isaac David , Arthur Gervais

With the rapid advancement of Vision Language Models (VLMs), refusal mechanisms have become a critical component for ensuring responsible and safe model behavior. However, existing refusal strategies are largely \textit{one-size-fits-all}…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jiaxi Yang , Shicheng Liu , Yuchen Yang , Dongwon Lee

Large language models (LLMs) typically deploy safety mechanisms to prevent harmful content generation. Most current approaches focus narrowly on risks posed by malicious actors, often framing risks as adversarial events and relying on…

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable when trained on datasets containing harmful content, which leads to potential jailbreaking attacks in two scenarios: the integration of harmful texts within crowdsourced data used for pre-training…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Xiaoqun Liu , Jiacheng Liang , Muchao Ye , Zhaohan Xi

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance across natural language tasks and are increasingly deployed in real-world applications. Despite extensive safety alignment efforts, recent studies show that such alignment is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Yinzhi Zhao , Ming Wang , Shi Feng , Xiaocui Yang , Daling Wang , Yifei Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated great capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, largely attributed to the intricate alignment process using human feedback. While alignment has become an essential training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Bocheng Chen , Hanqing Guo , Guangjing Wang , Yuanda Wang , Qiben Yan

When we design and deploy an Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent, reward functions motivates agents to achieve an objective. An incorrect or incomplete specification of the objective can result in behavior that does not align with human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-03 Zhaoyue Wang

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

With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs), it has become a significant concern to ensure their safety and prevent harmful responses. While current safe-alignment methods based on instruction fine-tuning and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Xiaoyun Zhang , Zhengyue Zhao , Wenxuan Shi , Kaidi Xu , Di Huang , Xing Hu

Large language models (LLMs) excel in various capabilities but pose safety risks such as generating harmful content and misinformation, even after safety alignment. In this paper, we explore the inner mechanisms of safety alignment through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jianhui Chen , Xiaozhi Wang , Zijun Yao , Yushi Bai , Lei Hou , Juanzi Li

Refusal refers to the functional behavior enabling safety-aligned language models to reject harmful or unethical prompts. Following the growing scientific interest in mechanistic interpretability, recent work encoded refusal behavior as a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Giorgio Piras , Raffaele Mura , Fabio Brau , Luca Oneto , Fabio Roli , Battista Biggio

Many safety post-training methods for large language models (LLMs) are designed to modify the model's behaviour from producing unsafe answers to issuing refusals. However, such distribution shifts are often brittle and degrade performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 David Dobre , Mehrnaz Mofakhami , Sophie Xhonneux , Leo Schwinn , Gauthier Gidel

The growing awareness of safety concerns in large language models (LLMs) has sparked considerable interest in the evaluation of safety. This study investigates an under-explored issue about the evaluation of LLMs, namely the substantial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Yixu Wang , Yan Teng , Kexin Huang , Chengqi Lyu , Songyang Zhang , Wenwei Zhang , Xingjun Ma , Yu-Gang Jiang , Yu Qiao , Yingchun Wang

Safety alignment instills in Large Language Models (LLMs) a critical capacity to refuse malicious requests. Prior works have modeled this refusal mechanism as a single linear direction in the activation space. We posit that this is an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Peng Zhang , Peijie Sun

In LLM-based text-to-SQL systems, unanswerable and underspecified user queries may generate not only incorrect text but also executable programs that yield misleading results or violate safety constraints, posing a major barrier to safe…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Xuancheng Ren , Shijing Hu , Zhihui Lu , Jiangqi Huang , Qiang Duan

Language models (LMs) are increasingly used to build agents that can act autonomously to achieve goals. During this automatic process, agents need to take a series of actions, some of which might lead to severe consequences if incorrect…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Cheng-Kuang Wu , Zhi Rui Tam , Chieh-Yen Lin , Yun-Nung Chen , Hung-yi Lee

Current safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) face two key challenges: (1) under-generalization, which leaves models vulnerable to novel jailbreak attacks, and (2) over-alignment, which leads to the excessive refusal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Yutao Mou , Yuxiao Luo , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

In this paper, we argue that current safety alignment research efforts for large language models are hindered by many intertwined sources of noise, such as small datasets, methodological inconsistencies, and unreliable evaluation setups.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Tim Beyer , Sophie Xhonneux , Simon Geisler , Gauthier Gidel , Leo Schwinn , Stephan Günnemann

Human cognition, driven by complex neurochemical processes, oscillates between imagination and reality and learns to self-correct whenever such subtle drifts lead to hallucinations or unsafe associations. In recent years, LLMs have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Sharanya Dasgupta , Arkaprabha Basu , Sujoy Nath , Swagatam Das