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. 07535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) integrate heterogeneous modalities through modality alignment and fusion, enabling stronger understanding and reasoning.
By Xi Li, Shu Zhao, Xiaohan Zou, Fei Zhao, Fuxiao Liu, Yusen Zhang, Cheng Han, Yushun Dong, Jiaqi Wang
Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in consumer, medical, financial, and enterprise applications. This broad deployment expands the safety surface: risks can arise from multimodal question answering, assistant responses, and cross-modal composition, while moderation policies may vary across products, regions, and deployment stages.
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
arXiv:2603. 07445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data.
By Guoli Wang, Haonan Shi, Tu Ouyang, An Wang
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can internally detect harmful content, bypassing external guardrails that add latency and computational cost. By extracting activations from LLaMA‑3.1‑8B and training lightweight MLP probes, the authors achieve high F1 scores (99%, 83%, and 84%) on WildJailbreak, Beavertails, and AEGIS 2.0 benchmarks, rivaling much larger guard models while reducing overhead. This suggests that internal state monitoring can provide efficient safety checks for resource‑constrained, time‑critical deployments.
By Alizishaan Khatri, Chiquita Prabhu, Omkar Neogi
The paper investigates cross‑modal safety drift in multimodal large language models, where a harmless text query paired with a visual image can trigger harmful responses. Empirical analysis identifies unsafe response patterns and shows that visual cues receive limited attention, weakening refusal mechanisms. The authors introduce Safety‑Awareness Representation Transfer (SRT), a lightweight method that transfers safety signals from text processing to mitigate cross‑modal drift while maintaining model utility.
By Tianqi Xiao, Shiyao Cui, Minghao Zhang, Junxiao Yang, Renmiao Chen
arXiv:2605.01913v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vul...
By Sadia Asif, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri
arXiv:2606. 16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries.
By Ke Miao, Jiaxin Li, Hongliang Chen, Yuke Hu, Zhan Qin
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.
By Tobia Poppi, Silvia Cappelletti, Sara Sarto, Florian Schiffers, Garin Kessler, Marcella Cornia, Lorenzo Baraldi, Rita Cucchiara
arXiv:2506.07356v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: While Finetuning-as-a-Service (FaaS) enables customization of Large Language Models (LLMs) using user data, this service is vulnerable to safety de...
By Seokil Ham, Yubin Choi, Yujin Yang, Seungju Cho, Younghun Kim, Changick Kim
arXiv:2606. 05805v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-based guardrails typically safeguard agents by evaluating proposed actions or inputs before execution, producing safety signals such as binary allow/deny decisions, risk categories, and/or explanatory rationales about potential policy violations.
By Yuhao Sun, Jiacheng Zhang, Shaanan Cohney, Zhexin Zhang, Feng Liu, Xingliang Yuan