arXiv Machine Learning

Concept Concentration for Faithful Representation Intervention

arXiv:2505. 18672v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Representation intervention aims to localize and modify the representations that encode the underlying concepts in large language models (LLMs) to elicit the aligned and expected behaviors.

arXiv AI
Jul 28

Do LLMs Know Their Vulnerable Scenarios?

arXiv:2607. 23496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet embedding the same requests in particular scenarios can bypass their safeguards.

By Ziheng Peng, Huiqi Deng, Haoran Jing, Xuankun Rong, Jiahui Han, Xiting Wang, Na Zou, Xia Hu
arXiv AI
Sep 7

The Struggle Between Continuation and Refusal: A Mechanistic Analysis of the Continuation-Triggered Jailbreak in LLMs

The paper investigates a continuation-triggered jailbreak in large language models, showing that moving an instruction suffix can markedly boost jailbreak success. By performing mechanistic interpretability at the attention‑head level, the authors reveal that the jailbreak arises from a competition between the model’s natural continuation drive and safety defenses learned during alignment. They introduce Head Competition Steering (HCS), an inference‑time technique that exploits this competition to suppress harmful outputs and distill the approach into a student model for efficient safety improvements.

By Yonghong Deng, Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Xinyue Zhang, Zhongbin Guo, Chengzhi Li, Junxi Yin
arXiv AI
Sep 7

AlcaTRAz - Anchored Tree-Rule Defense Against Jailbreaks

AlcaTRAz is a prompt‑level defense that uses rule trees to insert controlled character‑level perturbations into input text, disrupting jailbreak attacks without modifying or retraining the target LLM. It operates solely on the input, making it suitable for black‑box deployments, and was evaluated on 33 open‑weight models and 22 jailbreak types, outperforming three baseline defenses in 73.4 % of model‑attack combinations. While it significantly reduces high‑severity jailbreak success, it does not eliminate it and is intended as one layer of a broader defense strategy.

By Jakub Re\v{s}, Petr Ka\v{s}ka, Martin Pere\v{s}\'ini, Martin Ukrop, Kamil Malinka
arXiv AI
Aug 25

A Reproducible, License-Aware Distillation Recipe for CPUDeployable Safety Classification

arXiv:2608.21570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deploying a safety layer for large language models on commodity hardware is constrained by the guards available to do it: current open guard models hol...

By Edson Rodrigues da Cruz Filho, Paulo Ricardo Ferreira Neves, Paulo Henrique Eleuterio Falsetti, Jo\~ao Vitor Pavan, Ian Degaspari, Henrique Vieira Laturrague, Patrick Vieira Laturrague, Guilherme Nielsen Dias, Marccello Wilson Perez Berto, Gustavo Voltani Von Atzingen
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Jailbreaking in the Haystack

The paper "Jailbreaking in the Haystack" introduces NINJA, a jailbreak technique that exploits long-context language models by appending benign, model-generated content to harmful user goals. It demonstrates that the position of harmful goals within the context is crucial for safety, and shows that NINJA significantly boosts attack success rates on models such as LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral, and Gemini. Unlike previous methods, NINJA is low-resource, transferable, less detectable, and compute‑optimal, revealing that carefully crafted benign long contexts can expose fundamental vulnerabilities in modern LMs.

By Rishi Rajesh Shah, Chen Henry Wu, Shashwat Saxena, Ziqian Zhong, Alexander Robey, Aditi Raghunathan