Language Model Security Database

A vulnerability exists in certain Large Language Models and diffusion models due to discontinuities in their latent space, which arise from data sparsity during training. An attacker can craft inputs containing lexically rare or semantically ambiguous constructs to guide the model's inference process toward these unstable, poorly-conditioned regions. This technique, termed "Alignment Degradation Induction," can degrade or bypass safety alignment mechanisms. Through iterative, multi-turn…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically open-weights models such as Llama-2, Mistral, and Vicuna, are vulnerable to a white-box adversarial attack framework termed RAID (Refusal-Aware and Integrated Decoding). The vulnerability exists because the model's safety alignment relies on specific activation patterns ("refusal directions") in the intermediate embedding space. Attackers can exploit this by optimizing a continuous "relaxed" suffix in the embedding space using a triplet loss…

Large Language Models (LLMs) that use special tokens to define conversational structure (e.g., via chat templates) are vulnerable to a jailbreak attack named MetaBreak. An attacker can inject these special tokens, or regular tokens with high semantic similarity in the embedding space, into a user prompt. This manipulation allows the attacker to bypass the model's internal safety alignment and external content moderation systems. The attack leverages four primitives: 1. Response Injection…

A vulnerability exists in Large Language Models (LLMs) and multi-label text classification systems that allows for Textual Dynamic Outputs Attacks (TDOA). This technique enables hard-label black-box attacks against systems with variable or generative output spaces (where the number of labels or specific label tokens are not fixed). The attack functions by training a surrogate model on clustered coarse-grained labels derived from the victim model's fine-grained dynamic outputs. It subsequently…

AdvEDM reveals a vulnerability in Vision-Language Model (VLM) based Embodied Decision-Making (EDM) systems, such as those used in autonomous driving and robotic manipulation. The vulnerability allows an attacker to launch fine-grained adversarial attacks that selectively modify the perception of specific objects in an input image—either by removing them (Semantic Removal) or adding them (Semantic Addition)—while preserving the semantic integrity of the rest of the scene.

Large Language Model (LLM) inference APIs that expose top-k logits or log-probabilities are vulnerable to model extraction and cloning. An attacker can execute a two-stage attack to replicate the proprietary model without access to weights, gradients, or training data. First, by submitting fewer than 10,000 random queries and aggregating the returned unrounded logits, the attacker recovers the model's output projection matrix using Singular Value Decomposition (SVD). Second, the attacker…

Large Language Models (LLMs), including Llama 2, Mistral, and Vicuna, are susceptible to a white-box adversarial attack that circumvents safety alignment mechanisms (such as RLHF). The vulnerability exists due to the models' susceptibility to intrinsic optimization of adversarial suffixes using Exponentiated Gradient Descent (EGD). Unlike previous methods that rely on inefficient discrete token searches (e.g., Greedy Coordinate Gradient) or standard projected gradient descent, this attack…

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) that utilize a projection layer (adapter) to bridge a vision encoder and a Large Language Model (LLM) contain a vulnerability stemming from the "Modality Gap"—a distributional distance between image and text token embeddings. This gap allows the visual modality to bypass the safety alignment (RLHF/instruction tuning) of the backbone LLM. Attackers can trigger harmful, toxic, or illegal responses to queries that would be refused in text-only contexts by…

The Vision-Language Model (VLM) perception module in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) agents is vulnerable to adversarial 3D object injection via the Adversarial Object Fusion (AdvOF) framework. An attacker can generate physically plausible 3D objects with adversarial perturbations capable of deceiving the agent's VLM across multiple viewing angles and distances. The vulnerability exists due to a misalignment between 3D physical manipulations and the agent's 2D image perception, combined…

Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs), utilized for interpreting the internal residual stream activations of Large Language Models (LLMs) into human-understandable concepts, are vulnerable to adversarial input perturbations. By employing gradient-based optimization techniques adapted for SAEs (specifically a generalized Greedy Coordinate Gradient), an attacker can craft inputs via suffix appending or token replacement that manipulate the SAE's latent feature activations. This vulnerability allows for the…