arXiv AI

State-Dependent Safety Failures in Multi-Turn Language Model Interaction

arXiv:2603. 15684v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models is typically evaluated under isolated queries, yet real-world use is inherently multi-turn.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Evaluating Language Model Safety Across Long Adversarial Conversations

The paper investigates how conversational safety in language models degrades over extended, adversarial interactions. By testing three instruction‑tuned models with persistent adversarial users across up to 101 turns, the study finds that safe‑response rates drop sharply from 85–100% at the first turn to 15–44% by the end. This demonstrates that strong single‑turn safety does not guarantee continued safety in long conversations.

By Parisa Salmani, Peter R. Lewis
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Temporal Context Awareness: A Defense Framework Against Multi-turn Manipulation Attacks on Large Language Models

arXiv:2503. 15560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated multi-turn manipulation attacks, where adversaries strategically build context through seemingly benign conversational turns to circumvent safety measures and elicit harmful or unauthorized responses.

By Prashant Kulkarni, Assaf Namer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Forecasting Trajectory-Level Safety Risks in Black-Box Multi-Turn Interactions

arXiv:2607. 26820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve from standalone assistants into autonomous agents, ensuring their safety requires shifting beyond pointwise risk assessment to understand how risks emerge and unfold over long-horizon trajectories.

By Shi Lin, Peng Qian, Dinghao Liu, Renjie Sun, Sifan Wu, Dezhang Kong, Chenpei Wang, Xun Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 24

PASTABench: Proactive Assessment of Sequential Trajectories for Agent Safety

PASTABench introduces a benchmark of 1,139 multi-turn trajectories to evaluate proactive safety monitoring in large language models. It formalizes three dimensions of intervention—whether, when, and what risk—to address gaps in step-level isolation and post-hoc trajectory assessment. The study finds that proactive intervention is largely unsolved, with the best model achieving only 40.74% optimal-timing interventions, and reveals that smaller models’ safety scores are often driven by lexical overfitting rather than true risk comprehension.

By Jiapeng Sun, Yujin Zhou, Han Zhu, Pengcheng Wen, Jiayi Zhou, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Towards Multi-modal Multi-turn Safety: From Agentic Interaction to Strategic Alignment

The paper introduces MINT‑Safe, a new open‑source dataset of 11,270 multi‑image dialogues and 500 refusal VQA pairs designed to expose safety risks in multi‑modal large language models during open‑ended conversations. It also proposes TAD‑Align, a turn‑aware dual‑objective reward framework that dynamically up‑weights dialogue turns with inconsistent safety behavior, improving safety metrics on Qwen2.5‑VL‑7B‑Instruct and LLaVA‑Next‑7B. The results show over 10% reduction in attack success rate and notable gains in harmlessness and helpfulness while maintaining overall model performance.

By Han Zhu, Jiale Chen, Chengkun Cai, Shengjie Sun, Haoran Li, Yujin Zhou, Chi-Min Chan, Pengcheng Wen, Lei Li, Yike Guo, Sirui Han
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Before the Script, Set the Stage: How Worldview Simulation Amplifies Psychologically Grounded Persuasion in Multi-Turn Jailbreaking

The paper introduces BLUEPRINT, a safety‑evaluation framework that separates a factorized social‑influence strategy space from WORLDVIEWSIM, a cross‑turn situational context module. Using Monte Carlo Tree Search, it optimizes turn‑level combinations of 18 theory‑grounded influence factors across a four‑turn trajectory, achieving near‑ceiling ASR on six frontier models with an average of only 2.46 queries. The study reveals that model‑specific vulnerabilities arise from distinct influence factors and strategy transitions, yet all models share a recovery pathway that shifts toward concrete, executable task framing to escape hard‑refusal states, highlighting the importance of monitoring how dialogue state makes unsafe requests appear actionable.

By Siyu Chen, Haoran Wang, Xiaojian Li, Yao Huang, Yinpeng Dong, Wei Xu