arXiv AI

Adaptive Capitulation: A Structural Failure Mode of LLM Responses in Vulnerability Contexts

arXiv:2607. 19629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models operating in emotionally sensitive contexts face a structural trilemma: when users in vulnerable states request information that may reinforce maladaptive attribution, current response architectures resolve the tension through protective restriction, uninflected facilitation, or unintegrated co-presence of both imperatives -- each preserving one objective at the cost of the other.

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 26

Do LLMs Know Their Vulnerable Scenarios?

Safety-aligned large language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet embedding the same requests in particular scenarios can bypass their safeguards. Existing red-teaming methods empirically identify effective scenarios through observed attack outcomes, but why particular scenarios weaken refusal remains mechanistically unclear.

arXiv AI
2d ago

Safety in Self-Evolving Agents: A Survey

The article surveys safety concerns for self‑evolving agents that continually update their internal state, such as model parameters and memories, from new interactions. It introduces the SAVER framework, which tracks reusable influence, adaptation, violations, exposure, and response to assess whether safety properties persist as agents evolve. The survey finds that legitimate state can become unsafe when its persistence, authority, or scope expands beyond its original conditions, and highlights gaps in current research on descendant repair and longitudinal evaluation.

By Jiahao Chen, Zhou Feng, Oubo Ma, Yichen Yan, Ruixiao Lin, Hangtao Zhang, Linkang Du, Hengyu An, Yong Yang, Jun Liu, Junhao Li, Naen Xu, Chunyi Zhou, Yuan Su, Zehao Jin, Qianli Ma, Leyi Qi, Yiming Wang, Zhe Ma, Yuwen Pu, Mengyao Du, Yuanyi Song, Enhao Huang, Zhihui Fu, Jun Wang, Jinfeng Li, Yuefeng Chen, Hui Xue, Yiming Li, Tianyu Du, Shouling Ji
arXiv AI
Jun 9

When Behavioral Safety Evaluation Fails: A Representation-Level Perspective

arXiv:2606. 08044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) safety has often been evaluated at the behavior level, which provides limited evidence of internal robustness, as these evaluations target outputs rather than representation-level vulnerability under intervention.

By Enyi Jiang, Anders Gj{\o}lbye, Yibo Jacky Zhang, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Protective Capacity Hallucination: When Large Language Models Claim Nonexistent Capabilities

arXiv:2607. 13596v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When cast as the protector of a vulnerable user yet given no explicit capability boundary, a large language model (LLM) may respond not by acknowledging its limits but by claiming to have taken -- or to be taking -- a real-world protective action it cannot perform, such as contacting emergency services or administering care.

By Eunna Lee, Jungpyo Nam, Sunjun Hwang
arXiv AI
Jul 7

Large Language Models Generate Harmful Responses Using a Distinct Mechanism, Shared Across Harm Types

arXiv:2604. 09544v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) undergo alignment training to avoid harmful behaviors, yet the resulting safeguards remain brittle: jailbreaks routinely bypass them, and fine-tuning on narrow domains can induce ``emergent misalignment'' that generalizes broadly.

By Hadas Orgad, Boyi Wei, Kaden Zheng, Martin Wattenberg, Peter Henderson, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Yonatan Belinkov