The paper proposes a novel unsupervised safety detection method for large language models that relies on local sparsity in a linear representation space recovered via a sparse autoencoder. By masking SAE neurons based on shared active support among nearby points, the authors develop a locally masked anomaly detection framework with theoretical backing. Experiments across multiple architectures and datasets—including capability‑testing and safety‑specific sets—show that using only 1–2% of SAE neurons and a small amount of out‑of‑distribution data yields near‑optimal safety detection performance.
arXiv:2408. 16028v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Supervised-learning-based vulnerability detectors often fall short due to limited labelled training data.
By Weizhou Wang, Eric Liu, Xiangyu Guo, Xiao Hu, Ilya Grishchenko, David Lie
arXiv:2512. 22179v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Detecting previously unseen attacks remains a major challenge for machine learning-based intrusion detection systems.
By Rajeeb Thapa Chhetri, Saurab Thapa, Avinash Kumar, Zhixiong Chen
Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs. Existing defenses generally fall into inference-time detection or training-time mitigation, but face two key limitations.
arXiv:2607. 19894v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to backdoor attacks, where hidden triggers induce malicious outputs.
By Yuxi Li, Zhibo Zhang, Kailong Wang, Xingshuo Han, Ling Shi, Haoyu Wang
The paper introduces Learning to Detect (LoD), a framework for identifying unseen jailbreak attacks in Large Vision‑Language Models without relying on attack data or hand‑crafted heuristics. LoD extracts layer‑wise safety representations via Multi‑modal Safety Concept Activation Vectors and compresses them into a one‑dimensional anomaly score using a Safety Pattern Auto‑Encoder. Experiments show that LoD achieves state‑of‑the‑art AUROC across diverse unseen attacks on multiple LVLMs while improving efficiency.
By Shuang Liang, Zhihao Xu, Jiaqi Weng, Jialing Tao, Hui Xue, Xiting Wang