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Despite significant progress in alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that elicit harmful behaviors. Activation steering techniques offer a promising inference-time intervention approach, but…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Quy-Anh Dang , Chris Ngo

Gradient inversion attack enables recovery of training samples from model gradients in federated learning (FL), and constitutes a serious threat to data privacy. To mitigate this vulnerability, prior work proposed both principled defenses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Ruihan Wu , Xiangyu Chen , Chuan Guo , Kilian Q. Weinberger

The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) with external sources is becoming increasingly common, with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) being a prominent example. However, this integration introduces vulnerabilities of Indirect…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Tongyu Wen , Chenglong Wang , Xiyuan Yang , Haoyu Tang , Yueqi Xie , Lingjuan Lyu , Zhicheng Dou , Fangzhao Wu

Vision Language Models (VLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in integrating visual and textual information for understanding and reasoning, but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks. While activation steering has…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Sihao Wu , Gaojie Jin , Wei Huang , Jianhong Wang , Xiaowei Huang

Pre-trained vision-language models like CLIP have remarkably adapted to various downstream tasks. Nonetheless, their performance heavily depends on the specificity of the input text prompts, which requires skillful prompt template…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Yingjun Du , Wenfang Sun , Cees G. M. Snoek

Large language models (LLMs) are popular for high-quality text generation but can produce harmful content, even when aligned with human values through reinforcement learning. Adversarial prompts can bypass their safety measures. We propose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-03 Mansi Phute , Alec Helbling , Matthew Hull , ShengYun Peng , Sebastian Szyller , Cory Cornelius , Duen Horng Chau

Large language models (LLMs) can be controlled at inference time through prompts (in-context learning) and internal activations (activation steering). Different accounts have been proposed to explain these methods, yet their common goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Eric Bigelow , Daniel Wurgaft , YingQiao Wang , Noah Goodman , Tomer Ullman , Hidenori Tanaka , Ekdeep Singh Lubana

Ensuring privacy during inference stage is crucial to prevent malicious third parties from reconstructing users' private inputs from outputs of public models. Despite a large body of literature on privacy preserving learning (which ensures…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-12-02 Fengwei Tian , Ravi Tandon

Activation steering methods control large language model (LLM) behavior by modifying internal activations at inference time. However, most existing activation steering methods rely on a fixed steering strength, leading to either…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Arthur Vogels , Benjamin Wong , Yann Choho , Annabelle Blangero , Milan Bhan

Controlling the behaviors of large language models (LLM) is fundamental to their safety alignment and reliable deployment. However, existing steering methods are primarily driven by empirical insights and lack theoretical performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Dung V. Nguyen , Hieu M. Vu , Nhi Y. Pham , Lei Zhang , Tan M. Nguyen

Modern natural language processing (NLP) methods employ self-supervised pretraining objectives such as masked language modeling to boost the performance of various application tasks. These pretraining methods are frequently extended with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-02-26 Nils Rethmeier , Isabelle Augenstein

Prompt injection attacks manipulate large language models (LLMs) by misleading them to deviate from the original input instructions and execute maliciously injected instructions, because of their instruction-following capabilities and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yulin Chen , Haoran Li , Yuan Sui , Yufei He , Yue Liu , Yangqiu Song , Bryan Hooi

With the development of technology, large language models (LLMs) have dominated the downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, because of the LLMs' instruction-following abilities and inability to distinguish the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yulin Chen , Haoran Li , Yuan Sui , Yangqiu Song , Bryan Hooi

There are two primary ways of incorporating new information into a language model (LM): changing its prompt or changing its parameters, e.g. via fine-tuning. Parameter updates incur no long-term storage cost for model changes. However, for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Eric Zhang , Leshem Choshen , Jacob Andreas

With the growing applications of Deep Learning (DL), especially recent spectacular achievements of Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and LLaMA, the commercial significance of these remarkable models has soared. However, acquiring…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-11 Yongqi Jiang , Yansong Gao , Chunyi Zhou , Hongsheng Hu , Anmin Fu , Willy Susilo

As LLM agents transition from digital assistants to physical controllers in autonomous systems and robotics, they face an escalating threat from indirect prompt injection. By embedding adversarial instructions into the results of tool…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Qiang Yu , Xinran Cheng , Chuanyi Liu

Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness." We investigate the mechanisms underlying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Uzay Macar , Li Yang , Atticus Wang , Peter Wallich , Emmanuel Ameisen , Jack Lindsey

Generative language models (LMs) offer numerous advantages but may produce inappropriate or harmful outputs due to the harmful knowledge acquired during pre-training. This knowledge often manifests as undesirable correspondences, such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-20 Guitao Chen , Yunshen Wang , Hongye Sun , Guang Chen

Adversarially robust classifiers possess a trait that non-robust models do not -- Perceptually Aligned Gradients (PAG). Their gradients with respect to the input align well with human perception. Several works have identified PAG as a…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-08-10 Roy Ganz , Bahjat Kawar , Michael Elad

Implicit Personalization (IP) is a phenomenon of language models inferring a user's background from the implicit cues in the input prompts and tailoring the response based on this inference. While previous work has touched upon various…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Zhijing Jin , Nils Heil , Jiarui Liu , Shehzaad Dhuliawala , Yahang Qi , Bernhard Schölkopf , Rada Mihalcea , Mrinmaya Sachan