arXiv AI

Minimal, Local, Causal Explanations for Jailbreak Success in Large Language Models

arXiv:2605. 00123v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Safety trained large language models (LLMs) can often be induced to answer harmful requests through jailbreak prompts.

arXiv AI
Jul 28

Do LLMs Know Their Vulnerable Scenarios?

arXiv:2607. 23496v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet embedding the same requests in particular scenarios can bypass their safeguards.

By Ziheng Peng, Huiqi Deng, Haoran Jing, Xuankun Rong, Jiahui Han, Xiting Wang, Na Zou, Xia Hu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Jailbreaking in the Haystack

The paper "Jailbreaking in the Haystack" introduces NINJA, a jailbreak technique that exploits long-context language models by appending benign, model-generated content to harmful user goals. It demonstrates that the position of harmful goals within the context is crucial for safety, and shows that NINJA significantly boosts attack success rates on models such as LLaMA, Qwen, Mistral, and Gemini. Unlike previous methods, NINJA is low-resource, transferable, less detectable, and compute‑optimal, revealing that carefully crafted benign long contexts can expose fundamental vulnerabilities in modern LMs.

By Rishi Rajesh Shah, Chen Henry Wu, Shashwat Saxena, Ziqian Zhong, Alexander Robey, Aditi Raghunathan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 26

Do LLMs Know Their Vulnerable Scenarios?

Safety-aligned large language models are trained to refuse harmful requests, yet embedding the same requests in particular scenarios can bypass their safeguards. Existing red-teaming methods empirically identify effective scenarios through observed attack outcomes, but why particular scenarios weaken refusal remains mechanistically unclear.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

AlcaTRAz - Anchored Tree-Rule Defense Against Jailbreaks

AlcaTRAz is a prompt‑level defense that uses rule trees to insert controlled character‑level perturbations into input text, disrupting jailbreak attacks without modifying or retraining the target LLM. It operates solely on the input, making it suitable for black‑box deployments, and was evaluated on 33 open‑weight models and 22 jailbreak types, outperforming three baseline defenses in 73.4 % of model‑attack combinations. While it significantly reduces high‑severity jailbreak success, it does not eliminate it and is intended as one layer of a broader defense strategy.

By Jakub Re\v{s}, Petr Ka\v{s}ka, Martin Pere\v{s}\'ini, Martin Ukrop, Kamil Malinka
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

ToxScreen: Detecting Whether an LLM Has Been Poisoned

arXiv:2607. 26849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in high-stakes domains, adversaries may poison training data to implant backdoors: hidden triggers that covertly manipulate model behavior at inference time.

By Anthony Hughes, Nicole Xing, Collin Francel, Andy Kim, Andrew Draganov
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 29

ToxScreen: Detecting Whether an LLM Has Been Poisoned

As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in high-stakes domains, adversaries may poison training data to implant backdoors: hidden triggers that covertly manipulate model behavior at inference time. We ask whether a defender can recover such a trigger under realistic affordances, namely white-box access to the weights and knowledge of the behavior of concern, but no training data, no trusted reference model, no knowledge of the trigger, and no certainty that the model is poisoned.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 24

Concept Concentration for Faithful Representation Intervention

arXiv:2505. 18672v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Representation intervention aims to localize and modify the representations that encode the underlying concepts in large language models (LLMs) to elicit the aligned and expected behaviors.

By Hongzheng Yang, Yongqiang Chen, Zeyu Qin, Tongliang Liu, Chaowei Xiao, Kun Zhang, Bo Han
arXiv AI
Sep 7

The Struggle Between Continuation and Refusal: A Mechanistic Analysis of the Continuation-Triggered Jailbreak in LLMs

The paper investigates a continuation-triggered jailbreak in large language models, showing that moving an instruction suffix can markedly boost jailbreak success. By performing mechanistic interpretability at the attention‑head level, the authors reveal that the jailbreak arises from a competition between the model’s natural continuation drive and safety defenses learned during alignment. They introduce Head Competition Steering (HCS), an inference‑time technique that exploits this competition to suppress harmful outputs and distill the approach into a student model for efficient safety improvements.

By Yonghong Deng, Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Xinyue Zhang, Zhongbin Guo, Chengzhi Li, Junxi Yin