arXiv AI

How Narrative Wrapping Affects LLM Refusal: A Cross-Language Benchmark and Defense

The paper investigates how narrative wrapping can trick safety‑aligned language models into refusing a harmful request only when it is presented directly, but answering it when embedded in a role‑play or narrative context. It introduces GUISE, a multilingual benchmark that tests this vulnerability across English, modern Chinese, and Classical Chinese, and shows high attack success rates (up to 95.7%). The authors propose AXIS, a defense that aligns harmful‑request representations with the refusal direction and trains the model to refuse outright, achieving superior safety and usability scores on several large language models.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attacks

IndicSafeEval is a new evaluation framework that tests the safety robustness of large language models against persuasion-based jailbreak attacks in Indian languages. The benchmark includes 7,200 adversarial prompts covering ten safety-critical content categories, six persuasive strategies, and four languages (Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi). Experiments show that model safety varies significantly across languages, prompt styles, and risk categories, revealing that current English-centric safety evaluations miss important multilingual vulnerabilities.

By Saikat Mondal, Mamta, Deeksha Varshney, Oana Cocarascu, Asif Ekbal
arXiv AI
Sep 7

Refuse without Refusal: A Structural Analysis of Safety-Tuning Responses for Reducing False Refusals in Language Models

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

IndicSafeEval: Safety Robustness of Large Language Models under Multilingual Persuasive Jailbreak Attacks

IndicSafeEval is a new evaluation framework that tests the safety robustness of large language models against persuasion-based jailbreak attacks in Indian languages. The benchmark covers ten safety-critical content categories, six persuasive strategies, and four languages—Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, and Punjabi—producing 7,200 adversarial prompts. Experiments show that model safety varies significantly across languages, prompt styles, and risk categories, highlighting gaps in current English-centric safety assessments.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

Safety Targeted Embedding Exploit via Refinement

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 Machine Learning
Jun 25

RAS: Measuring LLM Safety Through Refusal Alignment

arXiv:2606. 25750v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is commonly performed by querying models with unsafe or jailbreak prompts and judging whether their outputs violate a safety policy.

By Chang-Chieh Huang, Yan-Lun Chen, Chia-Mu Yu, Wei-Bin Lee
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Truth Lies Deep: Countering Semantic Camouflage via Latent Intent Verification

The paper identifies a vulnerability in large language models where harmful intent can be hidden within benign narratives, a phenomenon termed Semantic Camouflage. By examining latent activation patterns across several small language model families, the authors discover an "Intent Horizon"—a layer depth where harmful intent representations collapse. They propose Latent Intent Verification (LIV), a lightweight probing defense that detects harmful intent in early layers and outperforms existing guardrails on the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset.

By Md. Hasib Ur Rahman
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 8

Culturally-Adapted Red-Teaming Across East and Southeast Asian Contexts: A Methodological and Comparative Analysis

Multilingual safety evaluation of large language models (LLMs) has predominantly relied on direct translation (DT) of English benchmarks into target languages - an approach that converts surface-level linguistic form while failing to reflect the cultural context embedded in threat scenarios, social norms, and legal frameworks. We construct paired DT and culturally-adapted (CA) datasets via 1:1 seed matching for four languages - Korean (KO), Japanese (JA), Thai (TH), and Khmer (KM) - and compare Attack Success Rate (ASR) and Cultural Realism scores across four open-source LLM.