NeuronFuzz is a white‑box fuzzing framework that uses internal safety neurons of large language models as continuous feedback for safety evaluation, eliminating the need to generate full model responses during testing. It constructs a SafetyOracle that converts neuron activations into a differentiable safety alarm score, enabling gradient‑based identification of sensitive template positions and fluent, context‑compatible prompt mutations. Evaluated on 21 text and multimodal models, NeuronFuzz achieves a 76‑100% jailbreak discovery rate on five white‑box source models and demonstrates strong zero‑shot transfer to open‑weight and proprietary targets.
By Zhiyuan Xu, Muhammad Firhard Roslan, Joseph Gardiner, Sana Belguith, Lichao Wu
Safety evaluation is critical for assessing whether aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) remain robust against jailbreak attacks. Existing automated testing methods, however, largely rely on response-...
NeuronGuard is a fine‑tuning defense for large language models that hardens them against both jailbreak and neuron‑level attacks. It redistributes safety signals across many neurons by identifying safety‑critical ones with per‑layer linear classifiers, enforcing refusal behavior when those neurons are ablated, and applying KL‑divergence regularization for consistency. A randomized gradient projection preserves task performance, and the authors provide a formal guarantee that NeuronGuard lowers the attack success rate upper bound, with experiments showing near‑zero success rates across multiple models and attack strategies.
By Anjun Gao, Yueyang Quan, Yufei Xia, Zhuqing Liu, Minghong Fang
arXiv:2508.09473v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Ensuring robust safety alignment while preserving utility is critical for the reliable deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, c...
By Birong Pan, Jianhao Chen, Mayi Xu, Qiankun Pi, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian
arXiv:2605.01913v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Fine-tuning safety-aligned language models for downstream tasks often leads to substantial degradation of refusal behavior, making models vul...
By Sadia Asif, Mohammad Mohammadi Amiri
arXiv:2603. 07445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data.
By Guoli Wang, Haonan Shi, Tu Ouyang, An Wang
arXiv:2608. 12821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to harmful requests and jailbreak attacks.
By Fangzhou Chen, Shiji Zhao, Mengyang Wang, Qihui Zhu, Ranjie Duan, Maoxun Yuan, Xingxing Wei
arXiv:2607. 19894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs.
By Yuxi Li, Zhibo Zhang, Kailong Wang, Xingshuo Han, Ling Shi, Haoyu Wang
Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs. Existing defenses generally fall into inference-time detection or training-time mitigation, but face two key limitations.
arXiv:2607. 00572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding how aligned LLMs internally represent safety is critical for diagnosing alignment vulnerabilities, as it explains why jailbreaks succeed and informs the design of robust alignment strategies.
By Shei Pern Chua, Fangzhao Wu
arXiv:2512. 05518v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) play a critical role in the democratization of AI, yet their "open" nature introduces more avenues for malicious actors to misuse them for harmful purposes.
By Jason Vega, Gagandeep Singh
arXiv:2608. 14392v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neuron- and path-level interventions offer the finest-grained route to defending large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks, yet existing methods fall short of this promise, i.
By Wei Zhao, Zhe Li, Peixin Zhang, Jun Sun