arXiv:2606. 00686v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The prevailing paradigm in large language model (LLM) alignment operates via erasure, filtering unsafe data or training models to strictly refuse harmful prompts.
By Maryam Hashemzadeh, Jerry Huang, Minseon Kim, Marc-Alexandre C\^ot\'e, Sarath Chandar
The paper introduces "cunning questions"—non‑safety prompts that contain misleading premises or subtle inconsistencies—to train large language models (LLMs) to scrutinize underlying intent and assumptions. Experiments show that incorporating these questions improves robustness against out‑of‑distribution jailbreak attacks and enhances subsequent safety fine‑tuning, achieving a new state‑of‑the‑art reduction in mean ASR from 17.40% to 15.05% across nine backbone–benchmark combinations. The authors argue that this training fosters vigilance, enabling models to prioritize safety judgments before engaging in harmful planning.
By Youjia Wang, Lin Xu, Yang Sun, Yuxiao Lu, Chengfang Fang, Jie Shi
arXiv:2609.36254v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to improve their generation of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning bef...
By Xiangyu Zhou, Saleh Zare Zade, Rafi Ibn Sultan, Alexander Kotov, Dongxiao Zhu
arXiv:2603. 07445v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) often require fine-tuning (FT) to perform well on downstream tasks, but FT can induce safety-alignment drift even when the training dataset contains only benign data.
By Guoli Wang, Haonan Shi, Tu Ouyang, An Wang
arXiv:2606. 02530v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values often degrades their general capabilities, termed the alignment tax.
By Hao Li, Jingkun An, Zijun Song, Pengyu Zhu, Rui Li, Hao Wang, Wendi Feng, Yesheng Liu, Lijun Li, Jin-Ge Yao, Lei Sha
arXiv:2602. 13562v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While reasoning models have achieved remarkable success in complex reasoning tasks, their increasing power necessitates stringent safety measures.
By Yanbo Wang, Minzheng Wang, Jian Liang, Lu Wang, Yongcan Yu, Ran He
arXiv:2606. 19168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: To achieve deeper safety alignment for large language models (LLMs), recent efforts have studied how to push safety interventions earlier into the pretraining stage, primarily by filtering unsafe data or rewriting it into safer forms.
By Jinhan Li, Kexian Tang, Yihan Xu, Zhuorui Ye, Kaifeng Lyu
arXiv:2510. 09330v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Ensuring that large language models (LLMs) comply with safety requirements is a central challenge in AI deployment.
By Tuan Nguyen, Long Tran-Thanh
Large reasoning models generate chain-of-thought (CoT) before answering but struggle with safety alignment and can be misled by flawed premises. The paper introduces RECAP, a reinforcement learning approach that trains models to override flawed reasoning paths and produce safe, helpful responses without extra training cost. RECAP improves safety, jailbreak robustness, and reduces overrefusal while preserving core reasoning abilities and inference token budget.
By ShengYun Peng, Pin-Yu Chen, Eric Smith, Song Jiang, Hongyuan Zhan, Haozhu Wang, Mahesh Pasupuleti, Duen Horng Chau, Jianfeng Chi
The paper investigates how large language models balance helpfulness and safety by refusing harmful queries while responding to benign ones. It decomposes safety-tuning responses into a boilerplate refusal statement and a rationale, finding that the statement causes false refusals by relying on superficial cues. Training on rationales alone reduces false refusals without compromising safety performance, suggesting that fine‑grained safety supervision is essential for better alignment.
By Minji Kim, Hyounghun Kim
Safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) typically depends on high-quality supervision data, such as safe demonstrations or preference pairs. However, in real-world deployment, emerging safety requirements are often specified as natural-language policies, while corresponding supervision data may be costly, delayed, or unavailable.
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.