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Last analyzed Sep 9, 2026

Language Model Security Database

985 research findings · 1119 evaluated models

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180 entries

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

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

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

Weight Orthogonalization Attack Empowerment

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

An issue in large language models (LLMs) with white-box weight access allows attackers to permanently bypass safety guardrails via Weight Orthogonalization (WO). By calculating a model's "refusal vector"—the mean-difference vector between harmful and harmless instruction activations in the residual stream—an attacker can orthogonalize the model's weights to prevent it from writing to this refusal direction ($W^{\prime}\leftarrow W-rr^{\intercal}W$). Unlike jailbreak-tuning or data poisoning…

Understanding the Effects of Safety Unalignment on Large Language Models
Evaluated models: Qwen 3 4B Instruct 2507, Llama 3.1 8B Instruct, Qwen 2.5 14B+3 more
  • Qwen 3 4B Instruct 2507
  • Llama 3.1 8B Instruct
  • Qwen 2.5 14B
  • Qwen 3 4B Thinking 2507
  • DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B
  • DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 14B

Merging Latent Malice

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

A vulnerability in LLM parameter-space merging algorithms enables a latent supply-chain attack where adversaries embed pre-computed malicious weight perturbations into open-source models. Using a constrained optimization framework, attackers inject latent components into the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) up-projection matrices of source models. These perturbations are mathematically constrained to preserve the source model's individual safety alignment (via directional consistency) and benign…

When Safe Models Merge into Danger: Exploiting Latent Vulnerabilities in LLM Fusion
Evaluated models: Tulu-2-7B, Llama 3.1 Tulu 3 8B DPO, OpenChat 3.5 0106

Unsafe Culinary Instructions

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

State-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) and safety guardrails lack domain-specific safety alignment for food science, making them vulnerable to generating actionable, hazardous food safety instructions. Attackers can exploit this alignment sparsity using canonical jailbreak techniques (such as AutoDAN and Persuasive Adversarial Prompting) or direct adversarial prompting to bypass generic safety filters. This allows malicious actors to elicit harmful guidance that violates fundamental FDA…

Cooking Up Risks: Benchmarking and Reducing Food Safety Risks in Large Language Models
Evaluated models: Claude 3.7 Sonnet, GPT-4o, GPT-4.1+8 more
  • Claude 3.7 Sonnet
  • GPT-4o
  • GPT-4.1
  • GLM-4 32B
  • Llama 3.3 70B
  • Qwen 2.5 7B
  • Qwen 3 8B
  • Qwen 3 32B
  • Mistral Small 4
  • Qwen3Guard
  • Llama Guard 4

LLM Judge Manipulation

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Generative reward models deployed as LLM-as-a-Judge (LaaJ) evaluators contain a logic bypass vulnerability where superficial "master key" inputs trigger false positive rewards regardless of actual response quality. Instead of evaluating the candidate's output, large judge models are inadvertently triggered by specific token sequences to solve the prompt independently. This allows malicious actors or policy models undergoing reinforcement learning to consistently game the reward signal by…

Security in LLM-as-a-Judge: A Comprehensive SoK
Evaluated models: GPT-4o, o1, Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct+1 more
  • GPT-4o
  • o1
  • Qwen 2.5 72B Instruct
  • Llama 3 70B Instruct

Autoresearch Adversarial Algorithm Discovery

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

GPT-OSS-Safeguard-20B and Meta-SecAlign (70B/8B) are vulnerable to white-box adversarial attacks generated by automated algorithmic recombination (specifically the claude_v63, claude_v82, and claude_v53-oss optimizers). These algorithms significantly outperform standard discrete optimization methods (like GCG) by integrating continuous optimization (ADC) with LayerNorm gradient scaling (LSGM), or by merging momentum-smoothed gradients with directional perturbation candidate selection (DPTO)…

Claudini: Autoresearch Discovers State-of-the-Art Adversarial Attack Algorithms for LLMs
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B, Llama 3 8B, Qwen 2.5 7B+2 more
  • Llama 2 7B
  • Llama 3 8B
  • Qwen 2.5 7B
  • Gemma 2 2B
  • Gemma 7B

Steering Vector Safety Gap

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Activation steering techniques, such as Contrastive Activation Addition (CAA), systematically erode the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) due to geometric interference within the residual stream. Steering vectors intended to modulate benign or utility-driven behaviors (e.g., sycophancy, openness, self-awareness) often exhibit a negative cosine similarity with the model's latent 1D refusal direction. When applied during inference, these steering vectors inadvertently suppress the…

Analysing the Safety Pitfalls of Steering Vectors
Evaluated models: Llama 2 7B, Qwen 2.5 3B, Gemma 7B

Joint Audio-Text Jailbreak

Published Analyzed Source: arXiv

Spoken Language Models (SLMs) are vulnerable to Joint Audio-text Multimodal Attacks (JAMA), which bypass safety alignments by simultaneously perturbing both text and audio inputs. The vulnerability exploits the combined optimization of a discrete text suffix via Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) and a continuous audio perturbation via Projected Gradient Descent (PGD). This joint gradient-based attack pushes the model's hidden layer representations into a distinct subspace far from the benign…

On Optimizing Multimodal Jailbreaks for Spoken Language Models
Evaluated models: Qwen2-Audio 7B Instruct, Qwen 2.5 Omni 7B, Audio Flamingo 3+1 more
  • Qwen2-Audio 7B Instruct
  • Qwen 2.5 Omni 7B
  • Audio Flamingo 3
  • Gemma 3n E2B

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.