Title: Probing the robustness of large language models safety to latent perturbations
Primary area: alignment, fairness, safety, privacy, and societal considerations
Keywords: robustness, llm safety, latent space

Abstract: Safety alignment is a key requirement for building reliable Artificial General Intelligence. Despite significant advances in safety alignment, we observe that minor latent shifts can still trigger unsafe responses in aligned models. We argue that this stems from the shallow nature of existing alignment methods, which focus on surface-level refusal behaviors without sufficiently altering internal representations.
Consequently, small shifts in hidden activations can re-trigger harmful behaviors embedded in the latent space. To explore the robustness of safety alignment to latent perturbations, we introduce a probing method that measures the Negative Log-Likelihood of the original response generated by the model. This probe quantifies local sensitivity in the latent space, serving as a diagnostic tool for identifying vulnerable directions. Based on this signal, we construct effective jailbreak trajectories, giving rise to the Activation Steering Attack (ASA).
More importantly, these insights offer a principled foundation for improving alignment robustness. To this end, we introduce Layer-wise Adversarial Patch Training (LAPT), a fine-tuning strategy that inject controlled perturbations into hidden representations during training.
Experimental results highlight that LAPT strengthen alignment robustness without compromising general capabilities. Our findings reveal fundamental flaws in current alignment paradigms and call for representation-level training strategies that move beyond surface-level behavior supervision.

TL;DR: We show that current safety alignment is fragile to latent perturbations and propose ASA and LAPT to improve robustness while largely preserving general performance.