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Safety alignment is a key requirement for building reliable Artificial General Intelligence. Despite significant advances in safety alignment, we observe that minor latent shifts can still trigger unsafe responses in aligned models. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Tianle Gu , Kexin Huang , Zongqi Wang , Yixu Wang , Jie Li , Yuanqi Yao , Yang Yao , Yujiu Yang , Yan Teng , Yingchun Wang

Modern large language model (LLM) developers typically conduct a safety alignment to prevent an LLM from generating unethical or harmful content. Recent studies have discovered that the safety alignment of LLMs can be bypassed by…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Xuan Chen , Yuzhou Nie , Lu Yan , Yunshu Mao , Wenbo Guo , Xiangyu Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet their safety mechanisms remain susceptible to adversarial attacks that exploit cognitive biases -- systematic deviations from rational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Xikang Yang , Biyu Zhou , Xuehai Tang , Jizhong Han , Songlin Hu

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the security of large language models (LLMs), causing them to exhibit anomalous behavior under specific trigger conditions. The design of backdoor triggers has evolved from fixed triggers to dynamic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Haotian Jin , Yang Li , Haihui Fan , Lin Shen , Xiangfang Li , Bo Li

Safety-aligned language models often refuse cybersecurity requests whose wording resembles misuse, even when the task is authorized and defensive. This makes security evaluation ambiguous: a failed answer may reflect missing capability or…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Isaac David , Arthur Gervais

While LLMs appear robustly safety-aligned in English, we uncover a catastrophic, overlooked weakness: attributional collapse under code-mixed perturbations. Our systematic evaluation of open models shows that the linguistic camouflage of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Somnath Banerjee , Pratyush Chatterjee , Shanu Kumar , Sayan Layek , Parag Agrawal , Rima Hazra , Animesh Mukherjee

The use of Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents in practical applications requires the consideration of suboptimal outcomes, depending on the familiarity of the agent with its environment. This is especially important in safety-critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-07 Frederik Schubert , Theresa Eimer , Bodo Rosenhahn , Marius Lindauer

Gradient optimization-based adversarial attack methods automate the learning of adversarial triggers to generate jailbreak prompts or leak system prompts. In this work, we take a closer look at the optimization objective of adversarial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Zhe Wang , Yanjun Qi

Large language models can follow complex instructions in a single turn, yet over long multi-turn interactions they often lose the thread of instructions, persona, and rules. This degradation has been measured behaviorally but not…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Vardhan Dongre , Joseph Hsieh , Viet Dac Lai , Seunghyun Yoon , Trung Bui , Dilek Hakkani-Tür

Adversarial attacks with improved transferability - the ability of an adversarial example crafted on a known model to also fool unknown models - have recently received much attention due to their practicality. Nevertheless, existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-12-05 Woo Jae Kim , Seunghoon Hong , Sung-Eui Yoon

The attention mechanism is an important reason for the success of transformers. It relies on computing pairwise relations between tokens. To reduce the high computational cost of standard quadratic attention, linear attention has been…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanno Ackermann , Hong Cai , Mohsen Ghafoorian , Amirhossein Habibian

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are foundational to modern multimodal applications, yet their susceptibility to adversarial attacks remains a critical concern. Prior white-box attacks rarely generalize across tasks, and black-box…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Hefei Mei , Zirui Wang , Chang Xu , Jianyuan Guo , Minjing Dong

While linear attention reduces the quadratic complexity of standard Transformers to linear time, it often lags behind in expressivity due to the removal of softmax normalization. This omission eliminates \emph{global competition}, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Mingwei Xu , Xuan Lin , Xinnan Guo , Wanqing Xu , Wanyun Cui

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Harethah Abu Shairah , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Bernard Ghanem , George Turkiyyah

Deep neural networks are susceptible to adversarial examples while suffering from incorrect predictions via imperceptible perturbations. Transfer-based attacks create adversarial examples for surrogate models and transfer these examples to…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Jinjia Peng , Zeze Tao , Huibing Wang , Meng Wang , Yang Wang

In perpetrator treatment, a recurring observation is the dissociation between insight and action: offenders articulate remorse yet behavioral change does not follow. We report four preregistered studies (1,584 multi-agent simulations across…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Hiroki Fukui

Transformer architectures have achieved remarkable success in various domains. While efficient alternatives to Softmax Attention have been widely studied, the search for more expressive mechanisms grounded in theoretical insight-even at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yifei Zuo , Yutong Yin , Zhichen Zeng , Ang Li , Banghua Zhu , Zhaoran Wang

AI developers often apply safety alignment procedures to prevent the misuse of their AI systems. For example, before Meta released Llama 2-Chat - a collection of instruction fine-tuned large language models - they invested heavily in safety…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Simon Lermen , Charlie Rogers-Smith , Jeffrey Ladish

Large Language Models (LLMs) tend to generate a long reasoning chain when solving complex tasks. However, as the reasoning chain extends, critical intermediate steps and the original prompt will be buried in the context, receiving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Hongxiang Zhang , Yuan Tian , Tianyi Zhang

The attention mechanism has been proven effective on various visual tasks in recent years. In the semantic segmentation task, the attention mechanism is applied in various methods, including the case of both Convolution Neural Networks…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Zheng Yuan , Jie Zhang , Yude Wang , Shiguang Shan , Xilin Chen