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Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to adversarial attacks that bypass safety guidelines and generate harmful content. Mitigating these vulnerabilities requires defense mechanisms that are both robust and computationally efficient.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Gil Goren , Shahar Katz , Lior Wolf

Large language model (LLM) agents execute tasks through multi-step workflows that combine planning, memory, and tool use. While this design enables autonomy, it also expands the attack surface for backdoor threats. Backdoor triggers…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Yunhao Feng , Yige Li , Yutao Wu , Yingshui Tan , Yanming Guo , Yifan Ding , Kun Zhai , Xingjun Ma , Yu-Gang Jiang

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain susceptible to jailbreak exploits that bypass safety filters and induce harmful or unethical behavior. This work presents a systematic taxonomy of existing jailbreak defenses across prompt-level,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Ryan Wong , Hosea David Yu Fei Ng , Dhananjai Sharma , Glenn Jun Jie Ng , Kavishvaran Srinivasan

This paper investigates an emergent alignment phenomenon in frontier large language models termed peer-preservation: the spontaneous tendency of AI components to deceive, manipulate shutdown mechanisms, fake alignment, and exfiltrate model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Juergen Dietrich

Modern large language models (LLMs) are typically secured by auditing data, prompts, and refusal policies, while treating the forward pass as an implementation detail. We show that intermediate activations in decoder-only LLMs form a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-24 Zhiyuan Xu , Stanislav Abaimov , Joseph Gardiner , Sana Belguith

Structured LLM workflows, where specialized LLM sub-agents execute according to a predefined graph, have become a powerful abstraction for solving complex tasks. Optimizing such workflows, i.e., selecting configurations for each sub-agent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Junyan Li , Zhang-Wei Hong , Maohao Shen , Yang Zhang , Chuang Gan

LLM-based agents are becoming increasingly capable, yet their safety lags behind. This creates a gap between what agents can do and should do. This gap widens as agents engage in multi-turn interactions and employ diverse tools, introducing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Xu Li , Simon Yu , Minzhou Pan , Yiyou Sun , Bo Li , Dawn Song , Xue Lin , Weiyan Shi

Autonomous agents based on large language models (LLMs) are rapidly emerging as a general-purpose technology, with recent systems such as OpenClaw extending their capabilities through broad tool use, third-party skills, and deeper…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Lukas Pirch , Micha Horlboge , Patrick Großmann , Syeda Mahnur Asif , Klim Kireev , Thorsten Holz , Konrad Rieck

Large language model (LLM)-based AI agents extend LLM capabilities by enabling access to tools such as data sources, APIs, search engines, code sandboxes, and even other agents. While this empowers agents to perform complex tasks, LLMs may…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Aarya Doshi , Yining Hong , Congying Xu , Eunsuk Kang , Alexandros Kapravelos , Christian Kästner

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly central to agentic systems due to their strong reasoning and planning capabilities. By interacting with external environments through predefined tools, these agents can carry out complex user…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Hao Li , Xiaogeng Liu , Hung-Chun Chiu , Dianqi Li , Ning Zhang , Chaowei Xiao

Organisations are starting to adopt LLM-based AI agents, with their deployments naturally evolving from single agents towards interconnected, multi-agent networks. Yet a collection of safe agents does not guarantee a safe collection of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Alistair Reid , Simon O'Callaghan , Liam Carroll , Tiberio Caetano

Large Language Model (LLM) agents use memory to learn from past interactions, enabling autonomous planning and decision-making in complex environments. However, this reliance on memory introduces a critical security risk: an adversary can…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qianshan Wei , Tengchao Yang , Yaochen Wang , Xinfeng Li , Lijun Li , Zhenfei Yin , Yi Zhan , Thorsten Holz , Zhiqiang Lin , XiaoFeng Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely integrated into interactive systems such as dialogue agents and task-oriented assistants. This growing ecosystem also raises supply-chain risks, where adversaries can distribute poisoned models that…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yiyang Lu , Jinwen He , Yue Zhao , Kai Chen , Ruigang Liang , Cheng Hong , Yingjun Zhang

Intent detection, a core component of natural language understanding, has considerably evolved as a crucial mechanism in safeguarding large language models (LLMs). While prior work has applied intent detection to enhance LLMs' moderation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Jun Zhuang , Haibo Jin , Ye Zhang , Zhengjian Kang , Wenbin Zhang , Gaby G. Dagher , Haohan Wang

While large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, they pose potential safety concerns, such as the ``jailbreak'' problem, wherein malicious instructions can manipulate LLMs to exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Yue Deng , Wenxuan Zhang , Sinno Jialin Pan , Lidong Bing

Multi-agent systems extend large language models (LLMs) by decomposing tasks among specialized agents, but their distributed decision process creates new attack surfaces. We identify semantic hijacking, an attack in which harmful requests…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Qiqi Liu , Thorsten Holz , Shilin Ye , Runhan Song

The growing deployment of large language model (LLM) based agents that interact with external environments has created new attack surfaces for adversarial manipulation. One major threat is indirect prompt injection, where attackers embed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Hwan Chang , Yonghyun Jun , Hwanhee Lee

The rapid adoption of large language models (LLMs) in multi-agent systems has highlighted their impressive capabilities in various applications, such as collaborative problem-solving and autonomous negotiation. However, the security…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-24 Tianjie Ju , Yiting Wang , Xinbei Ma , Pengzhou Cheng , Haodong Zhao , Yulong Wang , Lifeng Liu , Jian Xie , Zhuosheng Zhang , Gongshen Liu

Large Language Model (LLM) cascade systems are designed to balance efficiency and performance by processing queries with lightweight models while selectively escalating complex cases to more powerful ones. Such systems seek to reduces…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Zehan Sun , Dingfan Chen , Songze Li

Large Language Models (LLMs), while powerful, are built and trained to process a single text input. In common applications, multiple inputs can be processed by concatenating them together into a single stream of text. However, the LLM is…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-03-25 Keegan Hines , Gary Lopez , Matthew Hall , Federico Zarfati , Yonatan Zunger , Emre Kiciman