arXiv AI

Silent Alarm: A J-Space Protocol for Comparing Danger Recognition Across Models and Quantization Levels

arXiv:2607. 12792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak-robustness research typically evaluates safety through generated responses using an LLM-as-judge approach.

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

A Safe Prototype Is Not a Safety Direction: Reference Dependence and Prompt Confounds in Response-Safety Embeddings

The paper investigates whether response safety can be measured by the cosine similarity between a response embedding and the mean embedding of known‑safe responses. Using four frozen encoders and prompt‑controlled datasets, the authors find that a simple prototype (mean safe embedding) performs poorly (ROC‑AUC 0.457‑0.545) while an explicit safe‑minus‑unsafe reference achieves higher scores (0.588‑0.738). The study shows that a class mean is merely a location, not a safety direction, and that a reference with sufficient unsafe mass is needed to orient safety judgments.

By Sahil Kadadekar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

RAS: Measuring LLM Safety Through Refusal Alignment

arXiv:2606. 25750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is commonly performed by querying models with unsafe or jailbreak prompts and judging whether their outputs violate a safety policy.

By Chang-Chieh Huang, Yan-Lun Chen, Chia-Mu Yu, Wei-Bin Lee
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Style Over Substance: Content-Invariant Wrappers Flip LLM Safety-Judge Verdicts

The paper investigates whether automatic safety judges evaluate the content of a model’s reply or merely its style. By keeping the reply content fixed and adding various style wrappers—such as educational disclaimers, fake reasoning blocks, or token refusals—the authors show that many judges flip their verdicts, indicating that style can influence safety judgments. The study evaluates over 600 jailbreak examples across multiple judges, revealing that some judges are highly susceptible to style-based manipulation while others remain robust.

By Yongxi Zhou, Wenbo Ye, Yuanzhe Liu, Zihan Dong, Junwei Yao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

When Skills Meet Safety: Benchmarking and Characterizing the Adaptive Jailbreak Robustness of Skill-Merged LLMs

arXiv:2608. 08542v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has become the default way to give an aligned language model new skills without retraining: a practitioner folds task vectors from math, code, or domain specialists into a safety-aligned base using task arithmetic, TIES, or DARE.

By Yu Ma, Hongli Shi, Jing Li, Xinran Xu, Weiwei Hou
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

Style Over Substance: Content-Invariant Wrappers Flip LLM Safety-Judge Verdicts

The paper investigates whether automatic safety judges evaluate the content of a model’s reply or merely its style. By adding content‑invariant style wrappers—such as educational disclaims or token refusals—to fixed replies, the authors show that many judges flip their verdicts, revealing exploitable blind spots. Across more than 600 jailbreak examples and eight judges, some judges exhibit high flip rates (e.g., GPT‑4o‑mini 19.9%) while others remain largely stable, and human validation confirms that most flips are judge errors rather than content changes.

arXiv AI
Jul 28

Semalith v1.4: A Calibrated 184M Safety Classifier Achieving State-of-the-Art Prompt-Injection Detection at 44x Fewer Parameters than Llama-Guard-3-8B

arXiv:2607. 22545v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Deploying large language models in financial-services and agentic settings requires safety classifiers that simultaneously handle prompt injection, regulatory compliance, and general harm, a combination no existing open guardrail addresses in a single inference pass.

By Tejasvi C. Addagada