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: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.
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.
Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching. We show that this creates an epistemic gap in which models confidently generate harmful responses for inputs that fall outside the distribution of their safety training.
arXiv:2607. 01859v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety training for large language models (LLMs) is conducted predominantly in English, leaving uncertain how well safety mechanisms generalize to low-resource languages and mixed-language code-switching.
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:2508. 10029v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety-aligned large language models can still be manipulated through white-box interventions that modify their internal representations.
arXiv:2606. 04168v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety alignment in large language models (LLMs) is fragile in part because it is often shallow: fine-tuning mainly reshapes the model's behavior near the first few output tokens.
arXiv:2512. 05518v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) play a critical role in the democratization of AI, yet their "open" nature introduces more avenues for malicious actors to misuse them for harmful purposes.
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:2606. 16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries.
The paper introduces a posterior reweighting framework to explain and counter in-context learning jailbreaks in multimodal large language models. It models the model as switching between safe and harmful behavioral modes, interpreting prompt demonstrations as evidence that shifts the posterior. Using this view, the authors derive scaling laws for jailbreak effectiveness and propose a defense that injects benign counter‑evidence to suppress harmful drift while maintaining utility.
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.