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Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models inherit rich world knowledge from vision-language backbones and acquire executable skills via action demonstrations. However, existing evaluations largely focus on action execution success, leaving action…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zixing Chen , Yifeng Gao , Li Wang , Yunhan Zhao , Yi Liu , Jiayu Li , Xiang Zheng , Zuxuan Wu , Cong Wang , Xingjun Ma , Yu-Gang Jiang

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

Safety evaluation for advanced AI systems assumes that behavior observed under evaluation predicts behavior in deployment. This assumption weakens for agents with situational awareness, which may exploit regime leakage, cues distinguishing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Igor Santos-Grueiro

Safety alignment instills in Large Language Models (LLMs) a critical capacity to refuse malicious requests. Prior works have modeled this refusal mechanism as a single linear direction in the activation space. We posit that this is an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Peng Zhang , Peijie Sun

Safety-aligned LLMs suffer from two failure modes: jailbreak (answering harmful inputs) and over-refusal (declining benign queries). Existing vector steering methods adjust the magnitude of answer vectors, but this creates a fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Haonan Zhang , Dongxia Wang , Yi Liu , Kexin Chen , Wenhai Wang

Agentic language models operate in a fundamentally different safety regime than chat models: they must plan, call tools, and execute long-horizon actions where a single misstep, such as accessing files or entering credentials, can cause…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Aradhye Agarwal , Gurdit Siyan , Yash Pandya , Joykirat Singh , Akshay Nambi , Ahmed Awadallah

Recent advancements in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) have gained significant attention due to their objective and verifiable reward signals, demonstrating strong performance in reasoning and code generation tasks.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Yuexiao Liu , Lijun Li , Xingjun Wang , Jing Shao

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, it is prudent to assess whether safety measures remain effective even if LLMs intentionally try to bypass them. Previous work introduced control evaluations, an adversarial…

The emergence of autonomous Large Language Model (LLM) agents capable of tool usage has introduced new safety risks that go beyond traditional conversational misuse. These agents, empowered to execute external functions, are vulnerable to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-14 Zeyang Sha , Hanling Tian , Zhuoer Xu , Shiwen Cui , Changhua Meng , Weiqiang Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly integrated into high-stakes applications, making robust safety guarantees a central practical and commercial concern. Existing safety evaluations predominantly rely on fixed collections of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Zafir Shamsi , Nikhil Chekuru , Zachary Guzman , Shivank Garg

Safety alignment in Language Models (LMs) is fundamental for trustworthy AI. However, while different stakeholders are trying to leverage Arabic Language Models (ALMs), systematic safety evaluation of ALMs remains largely underexplored,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Omar Abdelnasser , Fatemah Alharbi , Khaled Khasawneh , Ihsen Alouani , Mohammed E. Fouda

Safe exploration is critical for using reinforcement learning (RL) in risk-sensitive environments. Recent work learns risk measures which measure the probability of violating constraints, which can then be used to enable safety. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Michael Luo , Ashwin Balakrishna , Brijen Thananjeyan , Suraj Nair , Julian Ibarz , Jie Tan , Chelsea Finn , Ion Stoica , Ken Goldberg

Safety architectures for language models increasingly rely on external monitors to detect errors and inject corrective signals at inference time. For such systems to function in interactive settings, models must be able to incorporate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Felipe Biava Cataneo

Despite substantial investment in safety alignment, the vulnerability of large language models to sophisticated multi-turn adversarial attacks remains poorly characterized, and whether model scale or inference mode affects robustness is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Richard Young

Larger language models (LLMs) have taken the world by storm with their massive multi-tasking capabilities simply by optimizing over a next-word prediction objective. With the emergence of their properties and encoded knowledge, the risk of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-31 Rishabh Bhardwaj , Soujanya Poria

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable in real-world applications. However, their widespread adoption raises significant safety concerns, particularly in responding to socially harmful questions. Despite substantial efforts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Gabriel J. Perin , Runjin Chen , Xuxi Chen , Nina S. T. Hirata , Zhangyang Wang , Junyuan Hong

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to produce socially acceptable responses. However, this behavior is known to be brittle: further fine-tuning, even on benign or lightly contaminated data, can degrade safety and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Kaustubh Ponkshe , Shaan Shah , Raghav Singhal , Praneeth Vepakomma

Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in vision-language reasoning tasks, yet ensuring their safety remains a critical challenge. Recent input-side defenses detect unsafe images with CLIP and prepend safety…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-02 Xingyu Zhu , Beier Zhu , Junfeng Fang , Shuo Wang , Yin Zhang , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

We study whether low-rank spectral summaries of LoRA weight deltas can identify which fine-tuning objective was applied to a language model, and whether that geometric signal predicts downstream behavioral harm. In a pre-registered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Roi Paul

The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) is becoming increasingly important with their democratization. In this paper, we study the safety degradation that comes with adapting LLMs to new tasks. We attribute this safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Lama Alssum , Hani Itani , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Philip Torr , Adel Bibi , Bernard Ghanem