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Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs), particularly for cybersecurity tasks, primarily focuses on preventing misuse. While this approach reduces direct harm, it obscures a complementary failure mode: denial of assistance to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-12 David Campbell , Neil Kale , Udari Madhushani Sehwag , Bert Herring , Nick Price , Dan Borges , Alex Levinson , Christina Q Knight

Safety alignment is essential for building trustworthy artificial intelligence, yet it remains challenging to enhance model safety without degrading general performance. Current approaches require computationally expensive searches for the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Yutao Mou , Xiaoling Zhou , Yuxiao Luo , Shikun Zhang , Wei Ye

Do stock safety-aligned language models and their uncensored or abliterated derivatives behave differently when run as autonomous security agents? Single-turn refusal benchmarks cannot answer this question: security agents must inspect…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Isaac David , Arthur Gervais

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), despite possessing latent safety understanding from their vast pretraining data, remain vulnerable to generating harmful content and exhibit issues such as over-refusal and utility degradation after safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Yi Zhang , An Zhang , XiuYu Zhang , Leheng Sheng , Yuxin Chen , Zhenkai Liang , Xiang Wang

Safety alignment has become a critical step to ensure LLMs refuse harmful requests while providing helpful and harmless responses. However, despite the ubiquity of safety alignment for deployed frontier models, two separate lines of recent…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-06 John T. Halloran

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly deployed in interactive applications. However, their safety vulnerabilities become pronounced in multi-turn multi-modal scenarios, where harmful intent can be gradually…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Han Zhu , Jiale Chen , Chengkun Cai , Shengjie Sun , Haoran Li , Yujin Zhou , Chi-Min Chan , Pengcheng Wen , Lei Li , Sirui Han , Yike Guo

Safety alignment aims to ensure that large language models (LLMs) refuse harmful requests by post-training on harmful queries paired with refusal answers. Although safety alignment is widely adopted in industry, the overrefusal problem…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Zhiyu Xue , Zimo Qi , Guangliang Liu , Bocheng Chen , Ramtin Pedarsani

Reasoning-capable LLMs have achieved major breakthroughs in solving complex problems, but recent work shows that acquiring and deploying strong reasoning can introduce significant safety risks. A common mitigation is to apply a secondary…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yihao Xue , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Safety-aligned language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet refusal behavior can be suppressed by steering their internal representations. Existing methods do so by ablating a refusal direction from model activations, aiming…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Giorgio Piras , Raffaele Mura , Fabio Brau , Maura Pintor , Luca Oneto , Fabio Roli , Battista Biggio

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Gregory N. Frank

Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is primarily evaluated under open-ended generation, where models can mitigate risk by refusing to respond. In contrast, many real-world applications place LLMs in structured decision-making…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yuheng Chen , Zhiyu Wu , Bowen Cheng , Tetsuro Takahashi

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

Large language models (LLMs) typically deploy safety mechanisms to prevent harmful content generation. Most current approaches focus narrowly on risks posed by malicious actors, often framing risks as adversarial events and relying on…

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yangyang Guo , Ziwei Xu , Si Liu , Zhiming Zheng , Mohan Kankanhalli

Safety-aligned language models systematically refuse harmful requests. While activation steering can modulate refusal, ablating the raw "refusal vector" calculated from contrastive harmful and harmless prompts often causes collateral damage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Tony Cristofano

End-to-end autonomous driving systems excel in common scenarios but struggle with safety-critical long-tail cases. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are promising due to their strong reasoning capabilities. However, most VLA-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Kefei Tian , Yuansheng Lian , Kai Yang , Xiangdong Chen , Shen Li

Open-weight LLMs can be modified at inference time with simple activation edits, which raises a practical question for safety: do common safety interventions like refusal training or metatag training survive such edits? We study model…

Large language models (LLMs) often demonstrate strong safety performance in high-resource languages, yet exhibit severe vulnerabilities when queried in low-resource languages. We attribute this gap to a mismatch between language-agnostic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Junxiao Yang , Haoran Liu , Jinzhe Tu , Jiale Cheng , Zhexin Zhang , Shiyao Cui , Jiaqi Weng , Jialing Tao , Hui Xue , Hongning Wang , Han Qiu , Minlie Huang

Benefiting from the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), pre-trained visual encoder models connected to an LLMs can realize Vision Language Models (VLMs). However, existing research shows that the visual modality of VLMs…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-05-24 Zhendong Liu , Yuanbi Nie , Yingshui Tan , Xiangyu Yue , Qiushi Cui , Chongjun Wang , Xiaoyong Zhu , Bo Zheng
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