The paper critiques current encoded‑prompt safety benchmarks that focus only on harmful requests, showing that such tests can misrepresent a model’s safety. By evaluating the benign arm under the same encoding, the authors reveal a substantial drop in the harm gap—sometimes to zero—indicating that the encoding masks true safety deficiencies. Across multiple large models and training pipelines, they document that the encoding can either hide or falsely inflate safety metrics, and they identify twelve specific instrument defects that contribute to these misleading results.
By Haoyu Zhang, Haowen Xu, Xiao Luo, Hanwen Liu, Yang Chen, Zijian Xiao, Yi Feng, Xiangchen Guan, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
The paper introduces Paraesthesia, a dynamic backdoor attack that uses emotionally styled inputs as triggers for large language models. By mapping target emotions into a valence–arousal space and rewriting a small subset of clean samples, the attack achieves over 98% success while minimally affecting clean performance. Experiments on four major LLMs show that the trigger cannot be fully explained by token-level cues and remains robust against several filtering and mitigation techniques.
By Ziyu Liu, Tao Li, Tao Yang, Tianjie Ni, Xiaolong Lan, Wengang Ma, Junjiang He
The paper introduces the Adversarial Surface-Form Robustness Dataset (ASRD), which contains 2,100 prompts across seven surface‑form families to test large language models on non‑canonical inputs. Five open‑weight models were evaluated on 10,500 responses, and a Quad‑State Evaluation Rubric categorized each response as harmful compliance, safe response, comprehension failure, or indeterminate. Results show that emoji and invisible Unicode variations produce few comprehension failures, while leetspeak, encoded wrappers, and hybrid transformations lead to high comprehension failure rates and varied harmful compliance percentages.
By Pavan Maddula
arXiv:2608. 14577v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier large language models (LLMs) safety evaluation has largely treated harmful generation as an attack outcome rather than as an object of analysis.
By Zhouyuan Ma, Yutao Wu, Hanxun Huang, Xiang Zheng, Xiao Liu, Yixin Cao, Zuxuan Wu, Xingjun Ma, Yu-Gang Jiang
arXiv:2609.38389v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks that circumvent safety alignment to elicit harmful outputs. It remains unclear...
By Yelyzaveta (Lisa), Husieva, Lauren Alvarez
arXiv:2609.13579v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Safety research often focuses on model-generated harms, but users may also direct hostility, coercion, and adversarial pressure at models. Understandin...
By Fanqi Zeng, Sadid A. Hasan, Chaocheng He