The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can internally detect harmful content, bypassing external guardrails that add latency and computational cost. By extracting activations from LLaMA‑3.1‑8B and training lightweight MLP probes, the authors achieve high F1 scores (99%, 83%, and 84%) on WildJailbreak, Beavertails, and AEGIS 2.0 benchmarks, rivaling much larger guard models while reducing overhead. This suggests that internal state monitoring can provide efficient safety checks for resource‑constrained, time‑critical deployments.
arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.
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:2604. 07223v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve from static chatbots into autonomous agents, the primary vulnerability surface shifts from final outputs to intermediate execution traces.
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:2608.21775v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, yet they remain vulnerable to generating harmful content. From adver...
arXiv:2607. 02072v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in domains requiring guardrails to detect unsafe, off-topic, or adversarial prompts.
arXiv:2608. 05695v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model (LLM) agents increasingly invoke external tools and interact with real-world systems, unsafe actions may cause irreversible consequences on external states, user data, and downstream services.
arXiv:2607. 02121v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) and agentic systems become integrated into real-world applications, ensuring their safety and security is critical.
arXiv:2608.30703v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Runtime guardrails are essential for reliable large language model (LLM) deployment, yet existing approaches typically rely on independent, external...
arXiv:2607. 20982v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language model agents increasingly operate autonomously with access to tools and external environments, ensuring their safe and reliable behavior becomes critical.
Reflex-Guard is a lightweight, locally running guardrail for large language models that uses jailbreak-aware preprocessing, compact sentence‑transformer embeddings, and seven fast binary classifiers to filter unsafe prompts. It achieves 95.9% recall on harmful prompts with an end‑to‑end latency of 37.6 ms, far faster than existing solutions such as Llama Guard 2 (255 ms) and SafeDecoding (723 ms). The system can detect all GCG suffix attacks and Base64‑encoded prompts at the default threshold, and it attains a Reflex Efficiency Score up to 16.79, outperforming its competitors.
Reflex-Guard is a lightweight, locally‑run guardrail for large language models that uses jailbreak‑aware preprocessing, compact sentence‑transformer embeddings, and seven fast binary classifiers to filter unsafe prompts. It achieves 95.9 % recall on harmful prompts with an end‑to‑end latency of 37.6 ms, outperforming existing solutions such as Llama Guard 2 (255 ms) and SafeDecoding (723 ms). The system can detect all GCG suffix attacks and Base64‑encoded prompts at the default threshold, while DrAttack structured prompts require a lower threshold of 0.03 for optimal detection, and it attains a Reflex Efficiency Score of up to 16.79.