arXiv AI By Srinivasan Subramanian, Kazi Aminul Islam, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan

Beyond Unsafe Detection: Counterfactually Anchored Evidence Attribution for Multi-Turn LLM Safety Failures

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The paper introduces a counterfactually anchored evidence attribution approach for multi‑turn large language model safety failures. It presents a new dataset of 1,762 conversations, including adversarial, benign twins, and high‑risk vocabulary variants, and trains a lightweight hierarchical model that accurately predicts safety violations and attributes them to specific user turns and token spans. The model achieves high detection performance (F1 = 0.988) and significantly reduces adversarial confidence when top‑attributed tokens are removed, while maintaining low false‑positive rates on benign conversations.

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