The paper introduces a counterfactually anchored evidence attribution approach for multi‑turn large language model safety failures. It presents a new dataset of 1,762 conversations, including adversarial, benign twins, and high‑risk vocabulary variants, and trains a lightweight hierarchical model that accurately predicts safety violations and attributes them to specific user turns and token spans. The model achieves high detection performance (F1 = 0.988) and significantly reduces adversarial confidence when top‑attributed tokens are removed, while maintaining low false‑positive rates on benign conversations.
By Srinivasan Subramanian, Kazi Aminul Islam, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan
arXiv:2604. 07223v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve from static chatbots into autonomous agents, the primary vulnerability surface shifts from final outputs to intermediate execution traces.
By Yen-Shan Chen, Sian-Yao Huang, Cheng-Lin Yang, Yun-Nung Chen
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.
By Mingqian Zheng, Malia Morgan, Liwei Jiang, Carolyn Rose, Maarten Sap
arXiv:2607. 26820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve from standalone assistants into autonomous agents, ensuring their safety requires shifting beyond pointwise risk assessment to understand how risks emerge and unfold over long-horizon trajectories.
By Shi Lin, Peng Qian, Dinghao Liu, Renjie Sun, Sifan Wu, Dezhang Kong, Chenpei Wang, Xun Wang
arXiv:2606. 01738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-turn jailbreak attacks pose a growing threat to LLMs by exploiting conversational dynamics such as gradual escalation and cross-turn coordination.
By Zhiqing Ma, Zhonghao Xu, Dong Yu, Chen Kang, Changliang Li, Pengyuan Liu
arXiv:2606. 02423v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can serve as helpful assistants, yet they can equally function as harm amplifiers that enable malicious users to achieve harmful outcomes beyond their capabilities through extended interactions.
By Ruohao Guo, Wei Xu, Alan Ritter
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.
The paper introduces MINT‑Safe, a new open‑source dataset of 11,270 multi‑image dialogues and 500 refusal VQA pairs designed to expose safety risks in multi‑modal large language models during open‑ended conversations. It also proposes TAD‑Align, a turn‑aware dual‑objective reward framework that dynamically up‑weights dialogue turns with inconsistent safety behavior, improving safety metrics on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B‑Instruct and LLaVA‑Next‑7B. The results show over 10% reduction in attack success rate and notable gains in harmlessness and helpfulness while maintaining overall model performance.
By Han Zhu, Jiale Chen, Chengkun Cai, Shengjie Sun, Haoran Li, Yujin Zhou, Chi-Min Chan, Pengcheng Wen, Lei Li, Yike Guo, Sirui Han
arXiv:2609.36849v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Safety-aligned language models are commonly deployed as multi-turn assistants, which lets adversaries spread unsafe intent across several user turns...
By Omar Sheta, Rinku Deuja, Hadi Masoudi, Minghong Fang
arXiv:2608. 15594v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn jailbreak attacks have emerged as a critical safety threat to LLMs, as harmful objectives are decomposed across a sequence of apparently benign turns to bypass guardrails.
By Md Messal Monem Miah, Adrita Anika, Zhiyuan Yu, Ruihong Huang
PASTABench introduces a benchmark of 1,139 multi-turn trajectories to evaluate proactive safety monitoring in large language models. It formalizes three dimensions of intervention—whether, when, and what risk—to address gaps in step-level isolation and post-hoc trajectory assessment. The study finds that proactive intervention is largely unsolved, with the best model achieving only 40.74% optimal-timing interventions, and reveals that smaller models’ safety scores are often driven by lexical overfitting rather than true risk comprehension.
By Jiapeng Sun, Yujin Zhou, Han Zhu, Pengcheng Wen, Jiayi Zhou, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
arXiv:2606. 05414v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Early failure alerting requires deciding, while a dialog or agent trajectory is still unfolding, whether to flag it as likely to fail.
By Avinash Baidya, Xinran Liang, Ruocheng Guo, Xiang Gao, Kamalika Das