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

Machine learning models always make a prediction, even when it is likely to be inaccurate. This behavior should be avoided in many decision support applications, where mistakes can have severe consequences. Albeit already studied in 1970,…

Aligned language models that are trained to refuse harmful requests also exhibit over-refusal: they decline safe instructions that seemingly resemble harmful instructions. A natural approach is to ablate the global refusal direction,…

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, their ability to refuse ethically sensitive prompts-such as those involving hate speech or illegal activities-has become central to content moderation and…

LLM safety and ethical alignment are widely discussed, but the impact of content moderation on user satisfaction remains underexplored. In particular, little is known about how users respond when models refuse to answer a prompt-one of the…

Safety alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) refuse harmful requests by post-training on harmful queries paired with refusal answers. Although safety alignment is widely adopted in industry, the overrefusal problem…

Safety-aligned language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet refusal behavior can be suppressed by steering their internal representations. Existing methods do so by ablating a refusal direction from model activations, aiming…

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,…

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed with increasing real-world responsibilities, it is important to be able to specify and constrain the behavior of these systems in a reliable manner. Model developers may wish to set explicit…

Fair decisions require ignoring irrelevant, potentially biasing, information. To achieve this, decision-makers need to approximate what decision they would have made had they not known certain facts, such as the gender or race of a job…

Large language models are highly capable of answering difficult questions by retrieving, recombining, and attending to information in long contexts. For agentic tasks, an additional capability is required: the preservation of an exact state…

Large language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in multi-agent settings where they communicate intentions and take consequential actions with limited human oversight. A critical safety question is whether agents that…

Current alignment evaluation mostly measures whether models encode dangerous concepts and whether they refuse harmful requests. Both miss the layer where alignment often operates: routing from concept detection to behavioral policy. We…

Refusal on harmful prompts is a key safety behaviour in instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), yet the internal causes of this behaviour remain poorly understood. We study two public instruction-tuned models, Gemma-2-2B-IT and…

Formal logic enables computers to reason in natural language by representing sentences in symbolic forms and applying rules to derive conclusions. However, in what our study characterizes as "rulebreaker" scenarios, this method can lead to…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have become the cornerstone of today's generative AI ecosystem, sparking intense competition among tech giants and startups. In particular, an MLLM generates a text response given a prompt consisting…

Large Language Models (LLMs) interact with millions of people worldwide in applications such as customer support, education and healthcare. However, their ability to produce deceptive outputs, whether intentionally or inadvertently, poses…

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) can be circumvented through adversarially crafted inputs, yet the mechanisms by which these attacks bypass safety barriers remain poorly understood. Prior work suggests that a single…

Content Warning: This paper contains participant quotes and discussions related to mental health challenges, emotional distress, and suicidal ideation. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for mental health support, yet the…

Robots must balance compliance with safety and social expectations as blind obedience can cause harm, while over-refusal erodes trust. Existing safe reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks emphasize physical hazards, while human-robot…

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…