The paper investigates how large language models balance helpfulness and safety by refusing harmful queries while responding to benign ones. It decomposes safety-tuning responses into a boilerplate refusal statement and a rationale, finding that the statement causes false refusals by relying on superficial cues. Training on rationales alone reduces false refusals without compromising safety performance, suggesting that fine‑grained safety supervision is essential for better alignment.
Safety benchmarks for large language models often assess the risk of a user query, although the outcome of question answering depends on whether the response violates a policy. This distinction is cri...
arXiv:2501. 14940v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is essential for their safe deployment and widespread adoption.
arXiv:2609.01210v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety benchmarks for large language models often assess the risk of a user query, although the outcome of question answering depends on whether the...
arXiv:2607. 02914v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across diverse applications, yet ensuring their simultaneous safety, helpfulness, and trustworthiness remains a persistent challenge.
arXiv:2605. 14746v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While large language models (LLMs) are trained to align with human values, their generations may still violate safety constraints.
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.
The paper investigates how different post‑training methods—supervised fine‑tuning, reasoning‑augmented fine‑tuning, and preference optimization (ORPO)—affect the internal computation of refusal behavior in language models. Experiments on Llama‑3.1‑8B, Gemma‑2‑9B, and Qwen3‑8B show that reasoning‑augmented training consistently creates a distinct refusal computation across models, while the architecture influences the internal structure and steerability of refusal. None of the studied methods simultaneously achieve a distributed refusal mechanism, preserve general capability, and allow easy corrective edits, indicating that current post‑training approaches are not a fully reliable defense for safety-critical applications.
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.
The paper investigates whether existing AI safety benchmarks, designed for large language models, are suitable for evaluating small language models (SLMs). By testing five benchmark suites on 26 open‑source SLMs with a unified scoring rubric, the authors find that ambiguous judgments dominate, especially for complex prompts and certain architectures. This ambiguity, linked to factors like lexical density and output perplexity, undermines the reliability of aggregate leaderboards and reveals a confound between model capability and perceived safety.
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:2503. 11832v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent vision language models (VLMs) have made remarkable strides in generative modeling with multimodal inputs, particularly text and images.
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.