NeuronGuard is a fine‑tuning defense for large language models that hardens them against both jailbreak and neuron‑level attacks. It redistributes safety signals across many neurons by identifying safety‑critical ones with per‑layer linear classifiers, enforcing refusal behavior when those neurons are ablated, and applying KL‑divergence regularization for consistency. A randomized gradient projection preserves task performance, and the authors provide a formal guarantee that NeuronGuard lowers the attack success rate upper bound, with experiments showing near‑zero success rates across multiple models and attack strategies.
By Anjun Gao, Yueyang Quan, Yufei Xia, Zhuqing Liu, Minghong Fang
Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs. Existing defenses generally fall into inference-time detection or training-time mitigation, but face two key limitations.
arXiv:2607. 19894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs.
By Yuxi Li, Zhibo Zhang, Kailong Wang, Xingshuo Han, Ling Shi, Haoyu Wang
arXiv:2609.00051v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Despite extensive alignment efforts, Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to generating unsafe content under adversarial prompting, yet the...
By Kuan-Lin Chu, Chung-En Sun, Tsui-Wei Weng
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.
By Wenpeng Xing, Bohan Yang, Mohan Li, Chunqiang Hu, Haitao Xu, Ningyu Zhang, Bo Lin, Meng Han
arXiv:2602. 16835v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safety alignment is essential for the responsible deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Sasha Behrouzi, Lichao Wu, Mohamadreza Rostami, Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi
arXiv:2606. 03647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurately evaluating adversarial robustness is a longstanding challenge.
By Vincent Limbach, Jonas Dornbusch, David L\"udke, Stephan G\"unnemann, Leo Schwinn
arXiv:2609.16204v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Safety guardrails in open-weight language models can be readily bypassed using Refusal Feature Ablation (RFA), a technique that identifies and projects...
By Aashiq Muhamed, Mona T. Diab, Virginia Smith
arXiv:2606. 03486v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that hide harmful intent behind seemingly ordinary requests such as role-play, translation, encoding, adversarial suffixes, and multi-turn buildup.
By Zhongyang Lin, Ziran Zhao, Feifei Zhai, Pengyuan Liu
The paper introduces SEAL, a training-time, parameter‑efficient defense that attaches a plug‑and‑play adapter to the shared expert component of Mixture‑of‑Experts models, and SEAL++, which adds an orthogonal constraint to preserve existing safety subspaces. By leveraging the always‑activated shared expert, SEAL mitigates the structural vulnerability of sparse routing to adversarial manipulation, reducing attack success rates by up to 60% with minimal impact on model capability. The approach is evaluated across six attack scenarios involving harmful prompting, jailbreaks, malicious fine‑tuning, and neuron pruning.
By Qingyu Meng, Yiwei Zha, Jiahuan Pei, Koen Hindriks, Herbert Bos, Min Chen
Safety evaluation is critical for assessing whether aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) remain robust against jailbreak attacks. Existing automated testing methods, however, largely rely on response-...
arXiv:2508.09473v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Ensuring robust safety alignment while preserving utility is critical for the reliable deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, c...
By Birong Pan, Jianhao Chen, Mayi Xu, Qiankun Pi, Yuanyuan Zhu, Ming Zhong, Tieyun Qian