arXiv AI

HarmProfile: Characterizing Harmful Distributions in Frontier LLMs

arXiv:2608. 14577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier large language models (LLMs) safety evaluation has largely treated harmful generation as an attack outcome rather than as an object of analysis.

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

The Role of Fine-grained Harm Signals in LLM Safety

The study investigates how category‑specific harmfulness signals, isolated by removing the shared general harmfulness component, influence large language model (LLM) safety. Using activation steering across 11 risk categories in three instruction‑tuned LLMs, the authors find that the presence of harmfulness in these category residuals varies by category and that the pattern of inducing refusal is even more model‑dependent. Additionally, category residuals were shown to enhance the models’ downstream alignment with the shared general harmfulness representation, indicating that fine‑grained signals play a role beyond the general component.

By Soyeon Park (KAIST), Seogyeong Jeong (KAIST), Sunwoo Kim (KAIST), Alice Oh (KAIST)
arXiv AI
Aug 5

A Blind Spot in Alignment: Quantifying Biosecurity Risks in Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 02684v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are accelerating biological research, yet this same capability poses a critical biosecurity threat: models that assist in protein engineering can equally be prompted to generate predicted toxin-like sequences, potentially lowering the barrier to biological misuse.

By Shu Quan, Tianfang Hao, Sitong Fang, He Geng, Jiayi Zhou, Boyuan Chen, Kaile Wang, Donghai Hong, Juntao Dai, Yaodong Yang, Jiaming Ji
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Beyond Unsafe Detection: Counterfactually Anchored Evidence Attribution for Multi-Turn LLM Safety Failures

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