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The emergence of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduces a new paradigm of explicit reasoning, enabling remarkable advances yet posing unique risks such as reasoning manipulation and information leakage. To mitigate these risks, current…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jingnan Zheng , Jingjun Xu , Yanzhen Luo , Chenhang Cui , Gelei Deng , Zhenkai Liang , Xiang Wang , An Zhang , Tat-Seng Chua

Large language models deployed as agents increasingly interact with external systems through tool calls--actions with real-world consequences that text outputs alone do not carry. Safety evaluations, however, overwhelmingly measure…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-20 Arnold Cartagena , Ariane Teixeira

Refusal is a key safety behavior in aligned language models, yet the internal mechanisms driving refusals remain opaque. In this work, we conduct a mechanistic study of refusal in instruction-tuned LLMs using sparse autoencoders to identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Wei Jie Yeo , Nirmalendu Prakash , Clement Neo , Roy Ka-Wei Lee , Erik Cambria , Ranjan Satapathy

While reasoning models have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, their increasing power necessitates stringent safety measures. For safety alignment, the core challenge lies in the inherent trade-off between safety and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yanbo Wang , Minzheng Wang , Jian Liang , Lu Wang , Yongcan Yu , Ran He

Large language models exhibit systematic vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks despite extensive safety alignment. We provide a mechanistic analysis revealing that position-dependent gradient weakening during autoregressive training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Thong Bach , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

Large audio-language models (LALMs) extend text-based LLMs with auditory understanding, offering new opportunities for multimodal applications. While their perception, reasoning, and task performance have been widely studied, their safety…

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit gender bias, posing challenges for their safe deployment. Existing methods to mitigate bias lack a comprehensive understanding of its mechanisms or compromise the model's core capabilities. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Zeping Yu , Sophia Ananiadou

Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vulnerable to adversarial misuse. While prior work has shown that safety-relevant features are encoded…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Sadia Asif , Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri

Mechanistic interpretability reveals that safety-critical behaviors (e.g., alignment, jailbreak, backdoor) in Large Language Models (LLMs) are grounded in specialized functional components. However, existing safety attribution methods…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Miao Yu , Siyuan Fu , Moayad Aloqaily , Zhenhong Zhou , Safa Otoum , Xing fan , Kun Wang , Yufei Guo , Qingsong Wen

Large Language Models have shown impressive generative capabilities across diverse tasks, but their safety remains a critical concern. Existing post-training alignment methods, such as SFT and RLHF, reduce harmful outputs yet leave LLMs…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Zhengyue Zhao , Yingzi Ma , Somesh Jha , Marco Pavone , Patrick McDaniel , Chaowei Xiao

In recent years there has been enormous interest in vision-language models trained using self-supervised objectives. However, the use of large-scale datasets scraped from the web for training also makes these models vulnerable to potential…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-11-26 Alvi Md Ishmam , Christopher Thomas

Artificial intelligence safety research focuses on aligning individual language models with human values, yet deployed AI systems increasingly operate as interacting populations where social influence may override individual alignment. Here…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-05-12 Giordano De Marzo , Alessandro Bellina , Claudio Castellano , Viola Priesemann , David Garcia

Neurons and networks in the cerebral cortex must operate reliably despite multiple sources of noise. To evaluate the impact of both input and output noise, we determine the robustness of single-neuron stimulus selective responses, as well…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2018-01-24 Ran Rubin , L. F. Abbott , Haim Sompolinsky

Reasoning Language Models (RLMs) have gained traction for their ability to perform complex, multi-step reasoning tasks through mechanisms such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting or fine-tuned reasoning traces. While these capabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-04 Riccardo Cantini , Nicola Gabriele , Alessio Orsino , Domenico Talia

Detecting harmful AI actions is important as AI agents gain adoption. Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one method widely used to detect adversarial attacks and AI misalignment. However, attackers and misaligned models might evade CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Shiyuan Guo , Henry Sleight , Fabien Roger

As the influence of large language models (LLMs) spans across global communities, their safety challenges in multilingual settings become paramount for alignment research. This paper examines the variations in safety challenges faced by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Lingfeng Shen , Weiting Tan , Sihao Chen , Yunmo Chen , Jingyu Zhang , Haoran Xu , Boyuan Zheng , Philipp Koehn , Daniel Khashabi

Safety fine-tuning helps align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences for their safe deployment. To better understand the underlying factors that make models safe via safety fine-tuning, we design a synthetic data generation…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-22 Samyak Jain , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Kemal Oksuz , Tom Joy , Philip H. S. Torr , Amartya Sanyal , Puneet K. Dokania

Understanding the function of individual units in a neural network is an important building block for mechanistic interpretability. This is often done by generating a simple text explanation of the behavior of individual neurons or units.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Tuomas Oikarinen , Ge Yan , Tsui-Wei Weng

Multilingual Alignment is an effective and representative paradigm to enhance LLMs' multilingual capabilities, which transfers the capabilities from the high-resource languages to the low-resource languages. Meanwhile, some research on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Shimao Zhang , Zhejian Lai , Xiang Liu , Shuaijie She , Xiao Liu , Yeyun Gong , Shujian Huang , Jiajun Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) with safe-alignment training are powerful instruments with robust language comprehension capabilities. These models typically undergo meticulous alignment procedures involving human feedback to ensure the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Maithili Joshi , Palash Nandi , Tanmoy Chakraborty