The paper introduces CAM-Steer, a Category‑Adaptive Multi‑category Safety Steering framework that estimates risk for each harm category by comparing hidden states to safe and unsafe prototypes. It then combines safety directions into a single steering vector and applies a rotation whose angle is set by the estimated risks, preserving the hidden‑state norm. Experiments on three LLM backbones and seven harm categories show that CAM‑Steer outperforms baselines in defense success rate, even when multiple harm categories co‑occur, with negligible inference overhead.
arXiv:2608. 12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to harmful requests and jailbreak attacks.
The study investigates how category‑specific harmfulness signals, isolated by removing the shared general harmfulness component, influence large language model (LLM) safety. Using activation steering across 11 risk categories in three instruction‑tuned LLMs, the authors find that the presence of harmfulness in these category residuals varies by category and that the pattern of inducing refusal is even more model‑dependent. Additionally, category residuals were shown to enhance the models’ downstream alignment with the shared general harmfulness representation, indicating that fine‑grained signals play a role beyond the general component.
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.
arXiv:2606. 02423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can serve as helpful assistants, yet they can equally function as harm amplifiers that enable malicious users to achieve harmful outcomes beyond their capabilities through extended interactions.
arXiv:2608. 08383v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Steering vectors are a lightweight tool for controlling LLM behavior.
arXiv:2607. 02079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present HaloGuard 1.
arXiv:2606. 05290v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent progress in generative modeling has made safety control a central challenge, yet existing approaches remain largely model-specific, requiring retraining or tailored interventions for each new architecture.
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:2608. 09885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The safety of large language model (LLM) agents depends not only on model weights but also on the agent harness that manages context, memory, tools, permissions, and runtime control.
arXiv:2606. 19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms.
arXiv:2606. 02530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values often degrades their general capabilities, termed the alignment tax.
arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.