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Language models are instruction-tuned to refuse harmful requests, but the mechanisms underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. Popular steering methods operate on the residual stream and degrade output coherence at high…

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…

System prompts provide a lightweight yet powerful mechanism for conditioning large language models (LLMs) at inference time. While prior work has focused on English-only settings, real-world deployments benefit from having a single prompt…

We present causal evidence that hallucination in autoregressive language models is an early trajectory commitment governed by asymmetric attractor dynamics. Using same-prompt bifurcation, in which we repeatedly sample identical inputs to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks requiring complex reasoning, such as code generation, mathematical problem solving, and algorithmic synthesis -- especially when aided by reasoning tokens and…

We localize the policy routing mechanism in alignment-trained language models. An intermediate-layer attention gate reads detected content and triggers deeper amplifier heads that boost the signal toward refusal. In smaller models the gate…

Language models are trained to follow instructions, but they are also powerful pattern completers. What happens when these two objectives conflict? We construct conversations in which a user instruction to behave in a target way T (e.g.,…

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…

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,…

Linguistic representation learning in deep neural language models (LMs) has been studied for decades, for both practical and theoretical reasons. However, finding representations in LMs remains an unsolved problem, in part due to a dilemma…

People increasingly use large language models (LLMs) for everyday moral and interpersonal guidance, yet these systems cannot interrogate missing context and judge dilemmas as presented. We introduce a perturbation framework for testing the…

This study reveals a previously unexplored vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing aligned LLMs predominantly respond to unsafe queries with refusals, which often begin with a fixed set of prefixes…

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,…

Despite the outstanding performance of Large language Models (LLMs) in diverse tasks, they are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks, wherein adversarial prompts are crafted to bypass their security mechanisms and elicit unexpected responses.…

Safety evaluations of language models often treat serving configuration as fixed background infrastructure, but batch condition is an untested treatment variable whenever the same prompt may be evaluated alone, in a synchronized batch, or…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can reason over natural-language inputs, but their role in intrusion detection without fine-tuning remains uncertain. This study evaluates a prompt-only approach on UNSW-NB15 by converting each network flow to a…

Recent advances in prompt engineering enable large language models (LLMs) to solve multi-hop logical reasoning problems with impressive accuracy. However, there is little existing work investigating the robustness of LLMs with few-shot…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely deployed in real-world applications, yet their internal mechanisms remain difficult to interpret and control, limiting our ability to diagnose and correct undesirable behaviors. Mechanistic…

Jailbreaks have been a central focus of research regarding the safety and reliability of large language models (LLMs), yet the mechanisms underlying these attacks remain poorly understood. While previous studies have predominantly relied on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly relied upon for complex workflows, yet their ability to maintain flow of instructions remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks conflate task complexity with structural ordering, making it…