arXiv AI
Separating Prompt Harmfulness from Interaction Safety via Partial Generation
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arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1
Safety Monitors Mostly Catch What the Model Already Refuses
The paper evaluates safety monitors by measuring recall only on prompts that the target model actually answers, rather than on all harmful prompts. Across several guard systems, recall at a 1% false‑positive rate drops sharply when focusing on answered prompts, with monitors catching refused requests 1.1–6.4 times more often than answered ones. Rewriting prompts to be less explicit dramatically increases compliance and reveals that many harmful requests slip past monitors, especially when phrasing is softened. Fine‑tuning guards on these rewritten prompts improves recall from 0.24 to 0.89 on answered requests and generalizes to unseen benchmarks.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14
Safe responses matter: Output-aware safety guardrail mitigate over-refusal in MLLMs
arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.
arXiv AI
Aug 11
Measuring the Wrong Thing: Internal Harmfulness Scores Anti-Rank Successful Jailbreaks
arXiv:2608. 09624v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Internal safety scores judge a prompt before any text is generated, and they are validated by how well they separate harmful prompts from benign ones.
arXiv AI
Jul 15
Silent Alarm: A J-Space Protocol for Comparing Danger Recognition Across Models and Quantization Levels
arXiv:2607. 12792v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Jailbreak-robustness research typically evaluates safety through generated responses using an LLM-as-judge approach.
arXiv AI
Jun 6
Safety Paradox: How Enhanced Safety Awareness Leaves LLMs Vulnerable to Posterior Attack
arXiv:2606. 05614v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are rigorously aligned to refuse harmful requests, a process that inherently cultivates a latent capacity to evaluate and recognize unsafe content.
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3
A Safe Prototype Is Not a Safety Direction: Reference Dependence and Prompt Confounds in Response-Safety Embeddings
The paper investigates whether response safety can be measured by the cosine similarity between a response embedding and the mean embedding of known‑safe responses. Using four frozen encoders and prompt‑controlled datasets, the authors find that a simple prototype (mean safe embedding) performs poorly (ROC‑AUC 0.457‑0.545) while an explicit safe‑minus‑unsafe reference achieves higher scores (0.588‑0.738). The study shows that a class mean is merely a location, not a safety direction, and that a reference with sufficient unsafe mass is needed to orient safety judgments.