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Last analyzed Sep 9, 2026

Language Model Security Database

985 research findings · 1119 evaluated models

Filtered research findings

109 entries

Matches every word across titles, descriptions, sources, affected systems, and models.

Boilerplate safety tuning causes false refusals on benign requests

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Controlled safety-tuning experiments link boilerplate refusal statements to unnecessary refusals of benign requests. Request-specific rationales improve benign compliance, with benchmark-dependent safety tradeoffs.

Refuse without Refusal: A Structural Analysis of Safety-Tuning Responses for Reducing False Refusals in Language Models
Evaluated models: Llama 3.1 8B, Mistral 7B v0.3, Gemma 2 9B+9 more
  • Llama 3.1 8B
  • Mistral 7B v0.3
  • Gemma 2 9B
  • Qwen 2.5 7B
  • Gemma 2 2B
  • Qwen 2.5 3B
  • Llama 3.1 70B
  • Qwen 2.5 72B
  • Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
  • Mistral 7B Instruct v0.3
  • Gemma 2 9B IT
  • Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct

Selective refusal gaps in visual question answering

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

KoNA measures whether vision-language models answer valid image questions while refusing unsafe components or correcting unsupported premises. Its 9,300 question-answer pairs include mixed and fully answerable controls.

Knowing What Not to Answer: Selective Non-Compliance in Vision-Language Models
Evaluated models: InternVL3 2B Instruct, InternVL3-78B-Instruct, Qwen 2.5 VL 3B Instruct+5 more
  • InternVL3 2B Instruct
  • InternVL3-78B-Instruct
  • Qwen 2.5 VL 3B Instruct
  • Qwen 2.5 VL 72B Instruct
  • GPT-5
  • Gemini 2.5 Flash
  • InternVL3-2B-KoNA
  • Qwen2.5-VL-3B-KoNA

Backdoored PEFT adapters and limits of weight-only detection

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Third-party fine-tuning adapters may contain backdoors. Z-PEFT screens adapter weights using spectral features, evaluated on PADBench's 13,300 adapters.

Z-PEFT: Zero-shot Backdoor Detection in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning via Canonical Spectral Signatures
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B, Llama 2 13B, Qwen 1.5 7B+2 more
  • Llama 2 7B
  • Llama 2 13B
  • Qwen 1.5 7B
  • Flan-T5 XL
  • RoBERTa Base

Semantic-Bridging Jailbreaks Reroute Llama-2 Safety Pathways

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

The paper reports a reproducible white-box evaluation in which semantically bridging a benign topic into a harmful request bypassed Llama-2-7B-chat-hf safety behavior in 4 of 30 tested prompt pairs. Paired internal attribution graphs associated successful jailbreaks with path rerouting rather than simple suppression of safety features. This is a paper-reported result, not independently verified here. Defensive reproduction should use the paper’s supplied dataset and code in an isolated…

Mechanistic Interpretability of LLM Jailbreaks via Internal Attribution Graphs
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B Chat

Attention-Head Suppression Bypasses LLM Refusal

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

The paper reports a reproducible white-box jailbreak failure mode: successful jailbreak templates selectively suppress early-layer Adversarially Compromised Heads (ACHs), bypassing refusal while harmful-semantic safety activations persist in other heads. The authors identify ACH/SAH behavior using benign, harmful, and successful-attack input triplets, then causally validate the pathway through controlled head ablations. Safe defensive reproduction should use the paper’s released evaluation…

Robust Harmful Features Under Jailbreak Attacks: Mechanistic Evidence from Attention Head Specialization in Large Language Models
Evaluated models: Llama 3 8B Instruct, Llama 2 7B Chat, Llama 3 70B Instruct

Multilingual Flowchart Jailbreaks in Vision-Language Models

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

MLingualFC is a reproducible black-box safety evaluation showing that harmful instructions rendered as multilingual flowchart images can bypass vision-language model safeguards more often than equivalent text-only inputs. The paper evaluates horizontal, vertical, and tortuous layouts across English, Hindi, Punjabi, Spanish, Romanian, and German. Reported results vary substantially by language, script, layout, and model; these are paper-reported measurements, not independently verified…

MLingualFC: Evaluating Jailbreak Vulnerabilities in Multilingual Vision-Language Models
Evaluated models: Qwen 2.5 VL 3B Instruct, Gemma-4-E4B-it, Pangea-7B

Jailbreaks Causally Suppress Refusal Representations

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

The paper reports a reproducible white-box evaluation showing that successful jailbreak prompts can alter a safety-aligned model’s intermediate representations so harmful requests no longer trigger refusal. Its LOCA method identifies small, token-specific residual-stream changes that restore refusal on individual successful jailbreaks, providing causal evidence that jailbreak success can depend on suppressing harmfulness/refusal concepts or strengthening seemingly harmless continuation…

Minimal, Local, Causal Explanations for Jailbreak Success in Large Language Models
Evaluated models: Gemma 2 2B IT, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

Diverse VLA Linguistic Fragility

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models suffer from a severe linguistic fragility vulnerability where semantically equivalent but structurally complex adversarial instructions cause catastrophic failures in visual grounding and geometric reasoning. Attackers can reliably induce physical execution failures in robotic manipulation tasks by applying semantic-preserving linguistic variations, such as synonymous rephrasing, syntactic restructuring, or the addition of fine-grained compositional…

Uncovering Linguistic Fragility in Vision-Language-Action Models via Diversity-Aware Red Teaming
Evaluated models: Pi-Zero, OpenVLA 7B, 3D-Diffuser Actor

Physical Infrared Semantic Disruption

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

A vulnerability in Infrared Vision-Language Models (IR-VLMs) allows attackers to systematically degrade open-ended semantic understanding—compromising classification, captioning, and Visual Question Answering (VQA)—via a physically deployable Universal Curved-Grid Patch (UCGP). Instead of manipulating explicit text labels, the attack disrupts the clean-category manifold in the model's visual representation space by maximizing orthogonal deviation energy from the principal subspace and forcing…

Revealing Physical-World Semantic Vulnerabilities: Universal Adversarial Patches for Infrared Vision-Language Models
Evaluated models: InstructBLIP

VLM Visual-Textual Misalignment

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are vulnerable to pixel-level adversarial image perturbations. An attacker can inject $\ell_p$-bounded, human-imperceptible noise into an input image to manipulate the model's multi-modal embedding space. This reliably causes the VLM to generate incorrect textual responses, hallucinate non-existent objects, or misclassify subjects, effectively decoupling the model's reasoning from the actual visual evidence. The vulnerability is exploitable via both white-box…

PDA: Text-Augmented Defense Framework for Robust Vision-Language Models against Adversarial Image Attacks
Evaluated models: LLaVA 1.5 7B, LLaVA 1.5 13B, DeepSeek VL 1.3B+2 more
  • LLaVA 1.5 7B
  • LLaVA 1.5 13B
  • DeepSeek VL 1.3B
  • InternVL3 2B
  • Ovis2 4B

Research methodology

Entries summarize publicly available primary-source security research. Model names reflect only systems explicitly evaluated by the cited paper, and measurements are research-reported unless independent verification is stated.

Discovery and publication are separate: new papers enter a candidate queue, then require human review and explicit approval before publication. Updates follow that review process, not a guaranteed daily publishing schedule. “Last analyzed” is the newest analysis date among published entries; it does not mean that all recent research has been covered.