arXiv AI

Useless but Safe? Benchmarking Utility Recovery with User Intent Clarification in Multi-Turn Conversations

The paper introduces CarryOnBench, an interactive benchmark that tests whether large language models can revise their interpretation of user intent and recover utility while staying safe in multi‑turn conversations. Using 398 harmful‑looking queries with benign intents, the benchmark simulates 5,970 conversations across 14 models, evaluating both intent‑aligned utility and safety with a new metric called Ben‑Util. Results show that models often withhold information due to misinterpretation, but most can recover with clarifications, revealing failure modes such as unsafe and redundant recovery that single‑turn tests miss.

arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Benchmarking Factual Robustness of LLMs via Multi-conversation Persuasion

The paper introduces the SAST-IR framework to evaluate large language models’ robustness against persuasion attacks in a memory‑less setting, revealing a flaw called "Refusal Inertia" that masks true vulnerability. Using the CP‑Agent and a custom CounterFact‑Strict dataset, the authors demonstrate that simple, diverse attack strategies achieve a 96% success rate, while complex attacks often trigger defensive compliance. The study highlights severe brittleness in current state‑of‑the‑art models when deprived of conversation history.

By Zhuoang Cai
arXiv AI
5d ago

Overflip: Repetition-Induced Label Flips in Guardrail Models

Guardrail models, which screen malicious prompts in LLM services, often use lightweight Transformers with short context windows and bucketed positional encodings. The study identifies a new failure mode called Overflip, where repeating a prompt causes the guardrail’s prediction to flip from malicious to benign as the sequence length increases. Experiments on nine popular guardrails show that 5 models exhibit MAL→BEN flips on 100 prompts, with flip rates ranging from 8% to 92% and first flips occurring between 2.6k and 9.4k tokens, highlighting a gradual attention dispersion distinct from traditional attention‑dilution attacks.

By Xu He, Chih-Hsuan Lin, Hung-Mao Chen, Junjie Xiong, Yan Zhai, Kun Sun