arXiv:2606. 00686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prevailing paradigm in large language model (LLM) alignment operates via erasure, filtering unsafe data or training models to strictly refuse harmful prompts.
By Maryam Hashemzadeh, Jerry Huang, Minseon Kim, Marc-Alexandre C\^ot\'e, Sarath Chandar
arXiv:2608. 04565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based search agents are widely used for information-seeking tasks, but their reliance on external tool returns introduces a critical security risk: web content retrieved during execution is untrusted, exposing agents to prompt injection and goal hijacking.
By Xuebin Li, Hanqing Zhao, Siyuan Liang, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang, Dacheng Tao, Nenghai Yu
arXiv:2603. 00801v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language agents increasingly act as web-enabled systems that search, browse, and synthesize information from diverse sources.
By Shrey Shah, Levent Ozgur
RAG-Safety-Bench is a benchmark designed to evaluate how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) affects the safety of large language models (LLMs). It isolates safety impacts by testing four conditions: non-RAG, RAG with an oracle document, RAG with related but non-answer documents, and RAG with random safe documents. Results on five open-source LLMs reveal an inverse relationship between benign and unsafe capabilities, show that baseline safety guardrails do not guarantee safety in RAG, and confirm that even benign documents can trigger unsafe generation.
By Adithiyan Rajan Indira Saravanan, Kathleen C. Fraser
Allowing large language models (LLMs) to retrieve information from a set of trusted documents can increase reliability and reduce hallucination. However, recent work has demonstrated that retrieval-au...
The paper surveys attacks and defenses in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), a technique that improves large language models by grounding outputs in external knowledge. It identifies new robustness and security risks such as corpus poisoning, backdoor attacks, privacy leakage, and fairness violations, and notes that existing surveys inadequately cover attacker objectives, threat models, and stage-specific defenses. The survey offers a unified, pipeline-aware overview, formalizing threat models across the corpus, retriever, and generator, categorizing attacks by accuracy, privacy, and fairness, and reviewing defenses for retrieval, rerank, generation, and traceback stages, while also summarizing robustness benchmarks and explainability methods.
By Minh Tran, Cuong Dang, Tuc Nguyen, Khanh-Tung Tran, Minh Huynh Nguyen, Trinh Chau, Kien Le, Do Xuan Long, Jiahao Zhang, Hoang D. Nguyen, Thanh Le, Suhang Wang
arXiv:2607. 18295v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study whether alignment schemes that reshape a base model's output distribution, combined with bounded safety filters, can drive the probability of harmful behavior to zero in modern large language models.
By Aryan Dutt, Rui Mao, Anupam Chattopadhyay
Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content. In this work, we reveal that this advanced safety awareness inadvertently introduces a fatal vulnerability.
arXiv:2606. 18356v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tool-using language-model agents introduce security failures that go beyond unsafe text: they can disclose protected objects, write persistent memory, send messages, modify databases, or trigger harmful code and tool effects.
By Yuchuan Tian, Mengyu Zheng, Haocheng Mei, Ye Yuan, Chao Xu, Xinghao Chen, Hanting Chen, Yu Wang
arXiv:2603. 19423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly rely on external tools (file operations, API calls, database transactions) to autonomously complete complex multi-step tasks.
By Shawn Li, Yue Zhao
arXiv:2608. 14577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier large language models (LLMs) safety evaluation has largely treated harmful generation as an attack outcome rather than as an object of analysis.
By Zhouyuan Ma, Yutao Wu, Hanxun Huang, Xiang Zheng, Xiao Liu, Yixin Cao, Zuxuan Wu, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
arXiv:2606. 05614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content.
By Long P. Hoang, Hai V. Le, Shaoyang Xu, Wei Lu, Wenxuan Zhang