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Safety alignment in Large Language Models (LLMs) remains highly fragile during fine-tuning, where even benign adaptation can degrade pre-trained refusal behaviors and enable harmful responses. Existing defenses typically constrain either…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Songping Peng , Zhiheng Zhang , Daojian Zeng , Lincheng Jiang , Xieping Gao

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) unlock powerful multimodal reasoning but also expand the attack surface, particularly through adversarial inputs that conceal harmful goals in benign prompts. We propose SHIELD, a lightweight,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Juan Ren , Mark Dras , Usman Naseem

Most jailbreak techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) primarily rely on prompt modifications, including paraphrasing, obfuscation, or conversational strategies. Meanwhile, abliteration techniques (also known as targeted ablations of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Maël Jenny , Jérémie Dentan , Sonia Vanier , Michaël Krajecki

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have achieved remarkable success in cross-modal understanding and generation, yet their deployment is threatened by critical safety vulnerabilities. While prior works have demonstrated the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Kun Wang , Cheng Qian , Miao Yu , Lilan Peng , Liang Lin , Jiaming Zhang , Tianyu Zhang , Yu Cheng , Yang Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed code completion tasks, providing context-based suggestions to boost developer productivity in software engineering. As users often fine-tune these models for specific applications, poisoning and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-12 Shenao Yan , Shen Wang , Yue Duan , Hanbin Hong , Kiho Lee , Doowon Kim , Yuan Hong

Large language models (LLMs) are widely deployed across various applications, often with safeguards to prevent the generation of harmful or restricted content. However, these safeguards can be covertly bypassed through adversarial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Kasimir Schulz , Amelia Kawasaki , Leo Ring

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Shaona Ghosh , Amrita Bhattacharjee , Yftah Ziser , Christopher Parisien

Backdoor unalignment attacks against Large Language Models (LLMs) enable the stealthy compromise of safety alignment using a hidden trigger while evading normal safety auditing. These attacks pose significant threats to the applications of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Biao Yi , Tiansheng Huang , Sishuo Chen , Tong Li , Zheli Liu , Zhixuan Chu , Yiming Li

Backdoor attacks pose a serious security threat to large language models (LLMs), which are increasingly deployed as general-purpose assistants in safety- and privacy-critical applications. Existing LLM backdoors rely primarily on…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Rui Wen , Mark Russinovich , Andrew Paverd , Jun Sakuma , Ahmed Salem

Alignment in LLMs is more brittle than commonly assumed: misalignment can be triggered by adversarial prompts, benign fine-tuning, emergent misalignment, and goal misgeneralization. Recent evidence suggests that some misalignment behaviors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Niklas Herbster , Martin Zborowski , Alberto Tosato , Gauthier Gidel , Tommaso Tosato

Large Language Model (LLM) alignment remains vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that elicit unsafe responses, motivating pre-model and post-model guards. Pre-model guards audit the safety of prompts before invoking target models. However,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Hongyu Cai , Arjun Arunasalam , Yiming Liang , Antonio Bianchi , Z. Berkay Celik

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized software development practices, yet concerns about their safety have arisen, particularly regarding hidden backdoors, aka trojans. Backdoor attacks involve the insertion of triggers into…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-03-06 Aftab Hussain , Md Rafiqul Islam Rabin , Navid Ayoobi , Mohammad Amin Alipour

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language tasks, but their safety and morality remain contentious due to their training on internet text corpora. To address these concerns, alignment…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Mohammad Bahrami Karkevandi , Nishant Vishwamitra , Peyman Najafirad

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings where inducing a bias toward a certain topic can have significant consequences, and backdoor attacks can be used to produce such models. Prior work on backdoor attacks has…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Anudeep Das , Prach Chantasantitam , Gurjot Singh , Lipeng He , Mariia Ponomarenko , Florian Kerschbaum

Activation steering has emerged as a powerful tool to shape LLM behavior without the need for weight updates. While its inherent brittleness and unreliability are well-documented, its safety implications remain underexplored. In this work,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-26 Yuxiao Li , Alina Fastowski , Efstratios Zaradoukas , Bardh Prenkaj , Gjergji Kasneci

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized software development practices, yet concerns about their safety have arisen, particularly regarding hidden backdoors, aka trojans. Backdoor attacks involve the insertion of triggers into…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Aftab Hussain , Md Rafiqul Islam Rabin , Mohammad Amin Alipour

Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models (LLMs). Current safety alignment methods have attempted to address these issues, but they experience two significant limitations: insufficient safety alignment depth and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Yuanbo Xie , Yingjie Zhang , Tianyun Liu , Duohe Ma , Tingwen Liu

Jailbreak backdoor attacks on LLMs have garnered attention for their effectiveness and stealth. However, existing methods rely on the crafting of poisoned datasets and the time-consuming process of fine-tuning. In this work, we propose…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Zhuowei Chen , Qiannan Zhang , Shichao Pei

Safety alignment mechanism are essential for preventing large language models (LLMs) from generating harmful information or unethical content. However, cleverly crafted prompts can bypass these safety measures without accessing the model's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Sunbowen Lee , Shiwen Ni , Chi Wei , Shuaimin Li , Liyang Fan , Ahmadreza Argha , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Ruifeng Xu , Yicheng Gong , Min Yang

Despite extensive efforts in safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Activation steering offers a training-free defense method but relies on fixed steering coefficients, resulting in suboptimal…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Weixiang Zhao , Jiahe Guo , Yulin Hu , Yang Deng , An Zhang , Xingyu Sui , Xinyang Han , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin , Tat-Seng Chua , Ting Liu