arXiv Machine Learning By Shravan Doda

Before the Last Token: Diagnosing Final-Token Safety Probe Failures

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arXiv:2605. 12726v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Final-token safety probes monitor a single hidden state after prompt prefill, but jailbreak prompts can contain probe-visible unsafe evidence distributed across earlier user-token representations that is missed by this readout.

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arXiv AI
Sep 7

The Struggle Between Continuation and Refusal: A Mechanistic Analysis of the Continuation-Triggered Jailbreak in LLMs

The paper investigates a continuation-triggered jailbreak in large language models, showing that moving an instruction suffix can markedly boost jailbreak success. By performing mechanistic interpretability at the attention‑head level, the authors reveal that the jailbreak arises from a competition between the model’s natural continuation drive and safety defenses learned during alignment. They introduce Head Competition Steering (HCS), an inference‑time technique that exploits this competition to suppress harmful outputs and distill the approach into a student model for efficient safety improvements.

By Yonghong Deng, Zhen Yang, Ping Jian, Xinyue Zhang, Zhongbin Guo, Chengzhi Li, Junxi Yin