arXiv AI

Breaking Safety at the Token Boundary: How BPE Tokenization Creates Exploitable Gaps in LLM Alignment

arXiv:2607. 01239v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Character-level perturbations bypass safety alignment in modern LLMs despite leaving prompts human-readable.

arXiv AI
Jun 3

Which Defense Closes Which Threat? Attributing OWASP-LLM-Top-10 Coverage and Its Brittleness Under Paraphrasing

arXiv:2606. 02822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Production LLM applications stack several defense families -- refusal-phrase filters, token-budget controls, model allowlists, rate limits, tool-registry authentication -- yet existing breach-and-attack-simulation (BAS) benchmarks report a single aggregate coverage number, hiding which family closes which threat.

By Alexandre Cristov\~ao Maiorano
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

Sensitivity, Causality, and Repair Dissociate: A Layer-Wise Analysis of Perturbation Robustness and Its Scaling

arXiv:2608. 03842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model fails on surface-perturbed input (typos, OCR noise, homophones), "which layer is responsible" has three natural operationalizations: where representations diverge most (sensitivity), where restoring clean activations recovers the prediction (causality), and where a small adapter can repair the damage (compensatory capacity) - and we show these three layer maps dissociate.

By Nathan Labiosa, David Buff, Ena Nayak, Erica Donno
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