arXiv AI

The Geometry of Refusal: Linear Instability in Safety-Aligned LLMs

arXiv:2606. 22686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on extensive safety alignment, yet the mechanistic basis of refusal remains opaque.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

RAS: Measuring LLM Safety Through Refusal Alignment

arXiv:2606. 25750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is commonly performed by querying models with unsafe or jailbreak prompts and judging whether their outputs violate a safety policy.

By Chang-Chieh Huang, Yan-Lun Chen, Chia-Mu Yu, Wei-Bin Lee
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

When Skills Meet Safety: Benchmarking and Characterizing the Adaptive Jailbreak Robustness of Skill-Merged LLMs

arXiv:2608. 08542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has become the default way to give an aligned language model new skills without retraining: a practitioner folds task vectors from math, code, or domain specialists into a safety-aligned base using task arithmetic, TIES, or DARE.

By Yu Ma, Hongli Shi, Jing Li, Xinran Xu, Weiwei Hou
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