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.
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:2606. 19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms.
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.
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.
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.
Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content. In this work, we reveal that this advanced safety awareness inadvertently introduces a fatal vulnerability.
arXiv:2606. 05614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content.
arXiv:2609.38389v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that circumvent safety alignment to elicit harmful outputs. It remains unclear...
Warning: This paper studies stereotypes and biases, and contains potentially disturbing examples, used for illustration purposes only. Our findings should not be interpreted as an argument against alignment.
arXiv:2606. 22686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) rely on extensive safety alignment, yet the mechanistic basis of refusal remains opaque.
The paper introduces "cunning questions"—non‑safety prompts that contain misleading premises or subtle inconsistencies—to train large language models (LLMs) to scrutinize underlying intent and assumptions. Experiments show that incorporating these questions improves robustness against out‑of‑distribution jailbreak attacks and enhances subsequent safety fine‑tuning, achieving a new state‑of‑the‑art reduction in mean ASR from 17.40% to 15.05% across nine backbone–benchmark combinations. The authors argue that this training fosters vigilance, enabling models to prioritize safety judgments before engaging in harmful planning.
arXiv:2608. 11583v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models is often treated as a distributed property of the entire network, yet its practical brittleness suggests that refusal behavior may be concentrated in a smaller set of parameters.