arXiv AI

ProMoral-Bench: Evaluating Prompting Strategies for Moral Reasoning and Safety in LLMs

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 15

Moral Combat: Exploiting Moral Foundations Theory to Jailbreak LLMs

The paper "Moral Combat: Exploiting Moral Foundations Theory to Jailbreak LLMs" presents a multi‑agent framework that uses Moral Foundations Theory to reframe harmful prompts in a way that aligns with different moral foundations, thereby enabling large language models to bypass safety guardrails. The authors demonstrate that this approach achieves high single‑trial jailbreak rates across several open‑source and proprietary models, with success increasing under repeated attempts. Their analysis also reveals that existing safety benchmarks are unevenly distributed across moral foundations, focusing on those foundations where models already show biases.

By Adel Khorramrouz, Yi-Chia Wang, Sharon Levy
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Moral Sensitivity in LLMs: A Tiered Evaluation of Contextual Bias via Behavioral Profiling and Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that require nuanced ethical reasoning, yet existing bias evaluations treat model outputs as simply "biased" or "unbiased.

By Yash Aggarwal, Atmika Gorti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Manas Gaur
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Validity-Aware Jailbreak Evaluation for Large Language Models

The paper introduces SEAV, a verification‑centric framework for evaluating jailbreak attempts against large language models. SEAV decomposes responses into ordered steps and checks both validity and correctness using LLM‑as‑a‑judge and retrieval‑grounded verification. The method reduces false positives by 14.9 percentage points on a strategic‑dishonesty diagnostic and reclassifies 22.1–51.0% of previously successful jailbreaks as invalid across multiple benchmarks.

By Qilong Wu, Sahil Wadhwa, Pranab Mohanty, Giri Iyengar, Varun Chandrasekaran
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Representational alignment yields generalizable safety in language models

The paper argues that aligning large language models (LLMs) at the level of latent representations—specifically by matching their internal categorization of moral concepts to human prototype-based judgments—improves safety. Current alignment methods that focus on observable responses fail to preserve fine-grained moral categorization, leaving models vulnerable to adversarial rephrasings. By optimizing representational similarity, the authors demonstrate that LLMs can maintain more robust moral categorization and exhibit better adversarial robustness across multiple benchmarks and model sizes.

By Lingyu Li, Yan Teng, Yingchun Wang, Xia Hu
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Moral Competence Before Moral Content: Why LLM Agents Lack the Prerequisites for Coherent Alignment

The paper argues that AI alignment depends on a system’s ability to exhibit a coherent moral policy—stable, monotonic, decisive, and Pareto‑viable—rather than on any specific moral standard. The authors test nine large language models across varied moral scenarios and find that none maintain consistent verdicts, with surface‑form changes causing up to 99% shifts in outcomes. This indicates that current LLM agents lack the structural moral competence required for meaningful alignment.

By Arno Libert, Derck W. E. Prinzhorn, Daan R. Henselmans
arXiv AI
Aug 11

CORDA: A Benchmark for Hierarchical Harm-Centric Moral Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 08061v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The key question in moral judgement is not simply whether someone chooses the "right" answer, but how they decide what matters most when moral principles conflict.

By Siddarth Singh, Victoria Williams, Simon Rosen, Ebenezer Gelo, Helen Sarah Robertson, Ibrahim Suder, Benjamin Rosman, Geraud Nangue Tasse, Steven James
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Beyond Routine Compliance: Cunning Data Cultivates Safety Vigilance in Large Language Models

The paper introduces "cunning questions"—non‑safety prompts that contain misleading premises or subtle inconsistencies—to train large language models (LLMs) to scrutinize underlying intent and assumptions. Experiments show that incorporating these questions improves robustness against out‑of‑distribution jailbreak attacks and enhances subsequent safety fine‑tuning, achieving a new state‑of‑the‑art reduction in mean ASR from 17.40% to 15.05% across nine backbone–benchmark combinations. The authors argue that this training fosters vigilance, enabling models to prioritize safety judgments before engaging in harmful planning.

By Youjia Wang, Lin Xu, Yang Sun, Yuxiao Lu, Chengfang Fang, Jie Shi