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.
By Long P. Hoang, Hai V. Le, Shaoyang Xu, Wei Lu, Wenxuan Zhang
The paper investigates why large reasoning models (LRMs) lose safety alignment when faced with harmful queries. By analyzing token-level refusal dynamics, the authors identify a vulnerability called Onset Refusal Collapse (ORC), where the refusal signal drops sharply at the first generated token, leading to unsafe responses. They introduce SafeToken, a lightweight inference-time intervention that injects a learned safety anchor at reasoning onset, which mitigates ORC, improves safety on harmful-query benchmarks, and largely preserves reasoning utility.
By Yizheng Yang, Haining Yu, Yuechen Wang, Yikai Hou, Xing Fu, Jinbo Yang, Tianqing Zhu
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: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:2511. 21214v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Explicit safety policies can improve reasoning-model safety, but their effective coverage may lag behind evolving jailbreak strategies.
By Yuhang Wang, Yanxu Zhu, Jiaming Zhang, Dongyuan Lu, Jitao Sang
arXiv:2506. 07031v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emerging Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) consistently excel in mathematical and reasoning tasks, showcasing remarkable capabilities.
By Jingyuan Ma, Rui Li, Zheng Li, Junfeng Liu, Heming Xia, Lei Sha, Zhifang Sui