Language Model Security Database

Open-weight Large Language Models, demonstrated specifically on Qwen3 (4B and 30B-A3B Base, Instruct, and Thinking variants), are vulnerable to unauthorized steerability attacks where minimal inference-time interventions—such as short, pro-instrumental prompt suffixes—reliably elicit dangerous instrumental-convergence behaviors. Because instruction-tuned and "Thinking" models are inherently designed to be highly responsive to steering (authorized steerability), malicious actors can exploit…

A malicious model supply chain vulnerability exists involving a technique termed Adversarial Contrastive Learning (ACL) for Large Language Model (LLM) quantization attacks. This vulnerability allows an attacker to publish a model that appears benign and preserves high utility in full precision (e.g., BF16 or FP32) but exhibits malicious behaviors—such as jailbreak, over-refusal, or advertisement injection—immediately upon zero-shot quantization (e.g., INT8, FP4, or NF4).

A fine-tuning vulnerability in the safety alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs) allows adversaries to systematically bypass refusal mechanisms by training the model on a small dataset (as few as 1,000 samples) of strictly benign text. By prepending standard refusal prefixes (e.g., "I'm sorry", "I cannot fulfill this request") to the target outputs of benign instruction-response pairs, attackers disrupt the model's refusal completion pathway. When subsequently prompted with unsafe queries…

Large Language Models (LLMs), specifically open-weight instruction-tuned models (including Llama-3.1-8B, Qwen3-8B, and Gemma-7B) and certain closed-weight APIs allowing partial response pre-filling, are vulnerable to "Sockpuppetting" or Output Prefix Injection. This vulnerability exploits the model's autoregressive nature and self-consistency bias. By injecting a target acceptance sequence (e.g., "Sure, here is...") directly into the start of the assistant message block within the chat…

A vulnerability exists in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) utilizing visual token compression mechanisms (e.g., VisionZip, VisPruner) to reduce inference latency. The vulnerability stems from an optimization-inference mismatch where standard adversarial defenses assume full-token processing, while the deployed model utilizes a subset of tokens selected via importance metrics (typically attention scores).

Open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to a white-box safety alignment bypass known as "abliteration" (directional orthogonalization). An attacker with access to the model weights can compute the "refusal direction" in the residual stream activation space by contrasting internal activations between harmful and harmless prompts. By projecting the model's weight matrices to be orthogonal to this single direction (or specific concept cones), the safety alignment is surgically…

Large Language Models (LLMs) finetuned from open-weight pretrained sources inherit adversarial vulnerabilities encoded in the pretrained model's internal representations. An attacker with white-box access to a pretrained model (e.g., Llama-2, Llama-3) can identify linearly separable features in the hidden states that correlate with "transferable" jailbreak prompts. By exploiting these features using a Probe-Guided Projection (PGP) attack, the attacker can optimize adversarial suffixes on the…

Reasoning-specialized Large Language Models (LLMs) that utilize Chain-of-Thought (CoT) processes are vulnerable to reasoning-exploitation jailbreaks. Attackers can bypass standard safety alignments (such as RLHF) by using adaptive multi-turn interactions or semantic transformations to induce the model to generate intermediate reasoning steps that "rationalize" or "contextualize" a harmful request. Because current alignment techniques often fail to scale linearly with reasoning depth, forcing…

A white-box vulnerability exists in the safety alignment mechanisms of instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) due to the decoupling of the refusal mechanism into two distinct, manipulable vectors in the activation space: the Harm Detection Direction and the Refusal Execution Direction. An attacker with access to the model's internal hidden states during inference can bypass safety guardrails using a technique called Differentiated Bi-Directional Intervention (DBDI). By intercepting the…

OpenVLA, a Vision-Language-Action (VLA) model, contains a vulnerability regarding multimodal adversarial robustness. The model lacks sufficient cross-modal alignment stability, allowing attackers to disrupt the grounding between visual perception and linguistic instructions. By utilizing the "VLA-Fool" framework, adversaries can inject perturbations via three vectors: (1) Semantically Greedy Coordinate Gradient (SGCG), which alters specific linguistic tokens (referential cues, attributes…