Why Safeguarded Ships Run Aground? Aligned Large Language Models' Safety
  Mechanisms Tend to Be Anchored in The Template Region
Authors: name: Chak Tou Leong; name: Qingyu Yin; name: Jian Wang; name: Wenjie Li
Published: 2025-02-19 18:42:45

Abstract: The safety alignment of large language models (LLMs) remains vulnerable, as
their initial behavior can be easily jailbroken by even relatively simple
attacks. Since infilling a fixed template between the input instruction and
initial model output is a common practice for existing LLMs, we hypothesize
that this template is a key factor behind their vulnerabilities: LLMs'
safety-related decision-making overly relies on the aggregated information from
the template region, which largely influences these models' safety behavior. We
refer to this issue as template-anchored safety alignment. In this paper, we
conduct extensive experiments and verify that template-anchored safety
alignment is widespread across various aligned LLMs. Our mechanistic analyses
demonstrate how it leads to models' susceptibility when encountering
inference-time jailbreak attacks. Furthermore, we show that detaching safety
mechanisms from the template region is promising in mitigating vulnerabilities
to jailbreak attacks. We encourage future research to develop more robust
safety alignment techniques that reduce reliance on the template region.