Related papers: Blind Refusal: Language Models Refuse to Help User…

When a user tells an AI system that someone "should not" take an action, the system ought to treat this as a prohibition. Yet many large language models do the opposite: they interpret negated instructions as affirmations. We audited 16…

Access control is a cornerstone of secure computing, yet large language models often blur role boundaries by producing unrestricted responses. We study role-conditioned refusals, focusing on the LLM's ability to adhere to access control…

Refusal mechanisms in large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring safety. Recent research has revealed that refusal behavior can be mediated by a single direction in activation space, enabling targeted interventions to bypass…

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is primarily evaluated under open-ended generation, where models can mitigate risk by refusing to respond. In contrast, many real-world applications place LLMs in structured decision-making…

Refusals - instances where large language models (LLMs) decline or fail to fully execute user instructions - are crucial for both AI safety and AI capabilities and the reduction of hallucinations in particular. These behaviors are learned…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) with multi-step reasoning capabilities have shown remarkable problem-solving abilities, yet they exhibit concerning safety vulnerabilities that remain poorly understood. In this work, we investigate why safety…

The application scope of large language models (LLMs) is increasingly expanding. In practical use, users might provide feedback based on the model's output, hoping for a responsive model that can complete responses according to their…

Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to refuse harmful instructions through safety fine-tuning. A recent attack, termed abliteration, identifies and suppresses the single latent direction most responsible for refusal behavior,…

Language models deployed in high-stakes professional settings face conflicting demands from users, institutional authorities, and professional norms. How models act when these demands conflict reveals a principal hierarchy -- an implicit…

Frontier large language models are increasingly deployed as orchestration backbones for biological research workflows, yet no shared evidence base exists for comparing their refusal behaviour on legitimate research prompts. RefusalBench,…

Safety alignment approaches in large language models (LLMs) often lead to the over-refusal of benign queries, significantly diminishing their utility in sensitive scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce FalseReject, a…

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…

Large language models and LLM-based agents are increasingly used for cybersecurity tasks that are inherently dual-use. Existing approaches to refusal, spanning academic policy frameworks and commercially deployed systems, often rely on…

This study addresses a critical gap in safety tuning practices for Large Language Models (LLMs) by identifying and tackling a refusal position bias within safety tuning data, which compromises the models' ability to appropriately refuse…

The ability of language models in RAG systems to selectively refuse to answer based on flawed context is critical for safety, yet remains a significant failure point. Our large-scale study reveals that even frontier models struggle in this…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into our daily lives and personalized. However, LLM personalization might also increase unintended side effects. Recent work suggests that persona prompting can lead models to falsely…

The trustworthiness of highly capable language models is put at risk when they are able to produce deceptive outputs. Moreover, when models are vulnerable to deception it undermines reliability. In this paper, we introduce a method to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are able to provide assistance on a wide range of information-seeking tasks. However, model outputs may be misleading, whether unintentionally or in cases of intentional deception. We investigate the ability of…

Confirmation bias, the tendency to seek evidence that supports rather than challenges one's belief, hinders one's reasoning ability. We examine whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit confirmation bias by adapting the rule-discovery…

Existing large language models (LLMs) occasionally generate plausible yet factually incorrect responses, known as hallucinations. Two main approaches have been proposed to mitigate hallucinations: retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs)…