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Related papers: Latent-space Attacks for Refusal Evasion in Langua…

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Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks. Practitioners deploy defense-trained models to protect against…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Shawn Li , Yue Zhao

A fundamental issue in deep learning has been adversarial robustness. As these systems have scaled, such issues have persisted. Currently, large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters suffer from adversarial attacks just like…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-11 Brian Formento , Chuan Sheng Foo , See-Kiong Ng

In this paper, we systematically evaluate the robustness of multi-exit language models against adversarial slowdown. To audit their robustness, we design a slowdown attack that generates natural adversarial text bypassing early-exit points.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Zachary Coalson , Gabriel Ritter , Rakesh Bobba , Sanghyun Hong

Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Michael Rizvi-Martel , Guillaume Rabusseau , Marius Mosbach

In this paper, we investigate the degree to which fine-tuning in Large Language Models (LLMs) effectively mitigates versus merely conceals undesirable behavior. Through the lens of semi-realistic role-playing exercises designed to elicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-01 Florin Pop , Judd Rosenblatt , Diogo Schwerz de Lucena , Michael Vaiana

Refusal behavior in aligned LLMs is often viewed as model-specific, yet we hypothesize it stems from a universal, low-dimensional semantic circuit shared across models. To test this, we introduce Trajectory Replay via Concept-Basis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Tony Cristofano

Recent latent-space monitoring techniques have shown promise as defenses against LLM attacks. These defenses act as scanners that seek to detect harmful activations before they lead to undesirable actions. This prompts the question: Can…

Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on safety alignment to obey safe requests while refusing harmful ones. However, traditional refusal mechanisms often lead to "rigid rejection," where a general template (e.g., "I cannot fulfill this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ying Zhang , Congyu Qiao , Xin Geng , Ning Xu

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) exhibit impressive performance, yet the integration of powerful vision encoders has significantly broadened their attack surface, rendering them increasingly susceptible to jailbreak attacks. However, lacking…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Jiaxin Song , Yixu Wang , Jie Li , Rui Yu , Yan Teng , Xingjun Ma , Yingchun Wang

Despite recent advances, Large Language Models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass alignment safeguards and elicit harmful outputs. While prior research has proposed various attack strategies differing in human readability…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Havva Alizadeh Noughabi , Julien Serbanescu , Fattane Zarrinkalam , Ali Dehghantanha

Large Audio Language Models (LALMs) have extended the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by enabling audio-based human interactions. However, recent research has revealed that LALMs remain vulnerable to harmful queries due to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Hao Yang , Lizhen Qu , Ehsan Shareghi , Gholamreza Haffari

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance and have come to dominate the field of natural language processing (NLP) across various tasks. However, due to their strong instruction-following capabilities and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Yulin Chen , Haoran Li , Yuan Sui , Yue Liu , Yufei He , Xiaoling Bai , Chi Fei , Yabo Li , Haozhe Ma , Yangqiu Song , Bryan Hooi

Safety alignment approaches in large language models (LLMs) often lead to the over-refusal of benign queries, significantly diminishing their utility in sensitive scenarios. To address this challenge, we introduce FalseReject, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Zhehao Zhang , Weijie Xu , Fanyou Wu , Chandan K. Reddy

Aligned large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Recent mechanistic studies have identified latent features and representation shifts associated with jailbreak success, but they leave a more fundamental question…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yu Chen , Yuanhao Liu , Qi Cao

While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional performance in surface-level text generation, their nature in handling complex multi-step reasoning tasks often remains one of ``statistical fitting'' rather than systematic logical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Lianlei Shan , Han Chen , Yixuan Wang , Zhenjie Liu , Wei Li

Safety-aligned large language models (LLMs) often generate refusal responses to harmless queries due to the over-refusal problem. However, existing methods for mitigating over-refusal cannot maintain a low refusal ratio for harmless queries…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yupeng Qi , Ziyu Lyu , Lixin Cui , Lu Bai , Feng Xia

LLMs utilizing chain-of-thought reasoning often waste substantial compute by producing long, incorrect responses. Abstention can mitigate this by withholding outputs unlikely to be correct. While most abstention methods decide to withhold…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hen Davidov , Nachshon Cohen , Oren Kalinsky , Yaron Fairstein , Guy Kushilevitz , Ram Yazdi , Patrick Rebeschini

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) holds promise as a means to learn high-reward policies from a static dataset, without the need for further environment interactions. However, a key challenge in offline RL lies in effectively stitching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Siddarth Venkatraman , Shivesh Khaitan , Ravi Tej Akella , John Dolan , Jeff Schneider , Glen Berseth

We propose a new architectural change, and post-training pipeline, for making LLMs more verbose reasoners by teaching a model to truncate forward passes early. We augment an existing transformer architecture with an early-exit mechanism at…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Elizabeth Pavlova , Mariia Koroliuk , Karthik Viswanathan , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young , Puria Radmard

Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to social-engineered attacks that are human-interpretable but require a high level of comprehension for LLMs to counteract. Existing defensive measures can only mitigate less than half of these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-01 Canaan Yung , Hadi Mohaghegh Dolatabadi , Sarah Erfani , Christopher Leckie