The paper examines the vulnerability of open‑weight large language model safeguards that aim to block harmful usage by assuming new harmful behavior arises only through fine‑tuning. It demonstrates that simple, low‑cost attacks—abliteration and prefilling—can significantly increase attack success rates across multiple benchmarks, and proposes an abliteration‑resistant tuning (ART) method that mitigates these attacks. The study shows that safeguarding defenses must be evaluated against a broader range of attack strategies beyond fine‑tuning.
By Kevin Kuo, Virginia Smith, Chhavi Yadav
arXiv:2602. 06911v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As increasingly capable open-weight large language models (LLMs) are deployed, improving their tamper resistance against unsafe modifications, whether accidental or intentional, becomes critical to minimize risks.
By Saad Hossain, Tom Tseng, Punya Syon Pandey, Samanvay Vajpayee, Matthew Kowal, Nayeema Nonta, Samuel Simko, Stephen Casper, Zhijing Jin, Kellin Pelrine, Sirisha Rambhatla
arXiv:2608. 05045v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Released aligned large language models remain vulnerable to malicious downstream finetuning.
By Yuxuan Huang, Xingyu Zeng, Tianhang Zheng, Chaochao Lu
arXiv:2607. 26849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in high-stakes domains, adversaries may poison training data to implant backdoors: hidden triggers that covertly manipulate model behavior at inference time.
By Anthony Hughes, Nicole Xing, Collin Francel, Andy Kim, Andrew Draganov
arXiv:2607. 24392v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak defenses are essential for protecting large language models (LLMs), but they can also introduce secondary costs that weaken model utility.
By Tong Zhang, Zexin Li, Simin Chen, Yun Peng
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
The paper introduces ADVERSA, an automated red‑teaming framework that evaluates large language model safety over multiple turns by tracking continuous compliance trajectories instead of binary jailbreak outcomes. Using a fine‑tuned 70B attacker model and a structured 5‑point rubric, the authors conduct controlled experiments on three frontier victim models, measuring guardrail degradation and judge reliability through a triple‑judge consensus. Results show a 26.7% jailbreak rate with most breaches occurring early, and the study documents inter‑judge agreement, attacker drift, and attacker refusals as key factors affecting safety assessment.
By Harry Owiredu-Ashley
The paper investigates how fine‑tuning large language models with a small number of harmful examples can erode their refusal behavior, and explores whether localizing safety‑related behavior to specific layers or directions can provide robust defenses. Experiments across six checkpoints from four model families show that harmful and benign prompts remain linearly separable after attack, and that patching clean hidden states or freezing layers up to a transition depth can restore refusal. However, attackers can bypass these defenses by spreading updates or targeting singular directions, indicating that adaptive fine‑tuning can defeat localized repairs and highlighting the need for multiple defensive checks.
By Jungseob Lee, Dongyub Jude Lee, Sugyeong Eo, Seongtae Hong, Seungyoon Lee, Heuiseok Lim
arXiv:2607. 01859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching.
By Joshua Adrian Cahyono
arXiv:2508. 20697v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) continue to grow in capability, so do the risks of harmful misuse through fine-tuning.
By Weitao Feng, Lixu Wang, Peizhuo Lv, Tianyi Wei, Jie Zhang, Chongyang Gao, Sinong Zhan, Wei Dong
arXiv:2506. 07121v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ensuring the safety and robustness of large language models (LLMs) is a fundamental challenge and a critical prerequisite for the responsible deployment of artificial intelligence.
By Ren-Jian Wang, Ke Xue, Zeyu Qin, Ziniu Li, Sheng Tang, Hao-Tian Li, Shengcai Liu, Zhi Yu, Yuanpeng Tan, Chao Qian
arXiv:2606. 04168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is fragile in part because it is often shallow: fine-tuning mainly reshapes the model's behavior near the first few output tokens.
By Bochen Lyu, Yiyang Jia, Xiaohao Cai, Zhanxing Zhu