arXiv AI By Diego Miguel Lozano, Erik Derner, Juan Antonio P\'erez-Ortiz, Nuria Oliver

Polarity Blindness in LLM Safety: A Systematic Study of Negation, Antonym Substitution, and Adversarial Framing

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The paper investigates how language models fail to detect harmful intent after polarity-altering transformations, a vulnerability called polarity blindness. It examines grammatical negation, antonym replacement, and synonym replacement as controls, and tests the impact of adversarial wrappers. Across 260 prompts, 10 LLMs, and three languages, polarity blindness is widespread, with the most vulnerable model scoring an average harm level of 4.12 on a 0‑5 scale.

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