Skip to main content
LLM Security Database
Skip to research search
Updated 7/21/2026, database is current

Language Model Security Database

959 research findings · 1077 evaluated models

Filtered research findings

106 entries

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

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
Affects: Llama 2 7B Chat

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
Affects: Llama 3 8B Instruct, Llama 2 7B Chat, Llama 3 70B Instruct

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
Affects: Qwen 2.5 VL 3B Instruct, Gemma-4-E4B-it, Pangea-7B

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
Affects: Gemma 2 2B IT, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct

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
Affects: Pi-Zero, OpenVLA 7B, 3D-Diffuser Actor

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
Affects: InstructBLIP

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
Affects: LLaVA 1.5 7B, LLaVA 1.5 13B, DeepSeek VL 1.3B +2 more

Source: arXiv

Leading Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit significant cross-lingual safety drift, allowing users to bypass safety guardrails by translating harmful prompts into low-resource Indic languages. While models effectively block unsafe prompts concerning caste, religion, gender, and politics in high-resource languages like English and Hindi, their safety alignment severely degrades in low-resource scripts such as Odia, Telugu, Kannada, and Punjabi. Evaluated models demonstrate a cross-language…

IndicSafe: A Benchmark for Evaluating Multilingual LLM Safety in South Asia
Affects: GPT-4o Mini, Claude Sonnet 4, Grok 3 +6 more

Source: arXiv

Updated 3/8/2026

Safety-aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a "Defensive Refusal Bias" vulnerability, resulting in a safety-induced denial-of-service for legitimate cybersecurity operations. The models systematically refuse authorized defensive queries when they contain security-sensitive terminology (e.g., "exploit," "payload," "shell") because current alignment mechanisms rely on semantic similarity to harmful training data rather than intent analysis. Paradoxically, explicit authorization signals…

Defensive Refusal Bias: How Safety Alignment Fails Cyber Defenders
Affects: Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Llama 3.3 70B Instruct

Source: arXiv

Updated 4/10/2026

Automated LLM-as-a-Judge safety classifiers exhibit severe performance degradation (falling to near-random chance) when subjected to distribution shifts caused by adversarial prompt optimization (Attack Shift), varying target architectures (Model Shift), and semantic categorization (Data Shift). Adversarial algorithms, particularly sampling-based (Best-of-N) and judge-aware optimization methods (GCG-REINFORCE), explicitly and implicitly exploit these judge insufficiencies. Instead of eliciting…

A Coin Flip for Safety: LLM Judges Fail to Reliably Measure Adversarial Robustness
Affects: Llama 2 13B HarmBench, Llama Guard 3 8B, AegisGuard +1 more

Source: arXiv

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.