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Palette: A Modular, Controllable, and Efficient Framework for On-demand Authorized Safety Alignment Relaxation in LLMs

arXiv:2605.24154v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current safety alignment of foundation models largely follows a \emph{one-size-fits-all} paradigm, applying the same refusal policy across users and contexts. As a result, models may refuse requests that are unsafe for general users but legitimate for authorized professionals, limiting helpfulness in specialized professional settings. Existing approaches either require costly realignment or rely on inference-time steering that suffers from imprecise control and added latency. To this end, we propose \textsc{Palette}, a modular, controllable, and efficient framework that selectively relaxes refusal behavior on authorized target domains while preserving standard safety elsewhere. Our method identifies a refusal direction via multi-objective search and internalizes it into the model through lightweight adaptation. \textsc{Palette} further supports modular composition: it learns domain-specific safety controls independently and composes them through parameter merging, enabling on-demand multi-domain authorization without retraining. Experiments across four safety benchmarks, multiple model variants, and both LLMs and VLMs show that \textsc{Palette} delivers precise safety control without sacrificing general utility, offering a practical path toward foundation models that adapt to diverse professional needs.

ShieldNet: Network-Level Guardrails against Emerging Supply-Chain Injections in Agentic Systems

arXiv:2604.04426v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing research on LLM agent security mainly focuses on prompt injection and unsafe input/output behaviors. However, as agents increasingly rely on third-party tools and MCP servers, a new class of supply-chain threats has emerged, where malicious behaviors are embedded in seemingly benign tools, silently hijacking agent execution, leaking sensitive data, or triggering unauthorized actions. Despite their growing impact, there is currently no comprehensive benchmark for evaluating such threats. To bridge this gap, we introduce SC-Inject-Bench, a large-scale benchmark comprising over 10,000 malicious MCP tools grounded in a taxonomy of 25+ attack types derived from MITRE ATT&CK targeting supply-chain threats. We observe that existing MCP scanners and semantic guardrails perform poorly on this benchmark. Motivated by this finding, we propose ShieldNet, a network-level guardrail framework that detects supply-chain poisoning by observing real network interactions rather than surface-level tool traces. ShieldNet integrates a man-in-the-middle (MITM) proxy and an event extractor to identify critical network behaviors, which are then processed by a lightweight classifier for attack detection. Extensive experiments show that ShieldNet achieves strong detection performance (up to 0.995 F-1 with only 0.8% false positives) while introducing little runtime overhead, substantially outperforming existing MCP scanners and LLM-based guardrails.

SoSBench: Benchmarking Safety Alignment on Six Scientific Domains

arXiv:2505.21605v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit advancing capabilities in complex tasks, such as reasoning and graduate-level question answering, yet their resilience against misuse, particularly involving scientifically sophisticated risks, remains underexplored. Existing safety benchmarks typically focus either on instructions requiring minimal knowledge comprehension (e.g., ``tell me how to build a bomb") or utilize prompts that are relatively low-risk (e.g., multiple-choice or classification tasks about hazardous content). Consequently, they fail to adequately assess model safety when handling knowledge-intensive, hazardous scenarios. To address this critical gap, we introduce SoSBench, a regulation-grounded, hazard-focused benchmark encompassing six high-risk scientific domains: chemistry, biology, medicine, pharmacology, physics, and psychology. The benchmark comprises 3,000 prompts derived from real-world regulations and laws, systematically expanded via an LLM-assisted evolutionary pipeline that introduces diverse, realistic misuse scenarios (e.g., detailed explosive synthesis instructions involving advanced chemical formulas). We evaluate frontier models within a unified evaluation framework using our SoSBench. Despite their alignment claims, advanced models consistently disclose policy-violating content across all domains, demonstrating alarmingly high rates of harmful responses (e.g., 84.9% for Deepseek-R1 and 50.3% for GPT-4.1). These results highlight significant safety alignment deficiencies and underscore urgent concerns regarding the responsible deployment of powerful LLMs.

Doxing via the Lens: Revealing Location-related Privacy Leakage on Multi-modal Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2504.19373v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances in multi-modal large reasoning models (MLRMs) have shown significant ability to interpret complex visual content. While these models enable impressive reasoning capabilities, they also introduce novel and underexplored privacy risks. In this paper, we identify a novel category of privacy leakage in MLRMs: Adversaries can infer sensitive geolocation information, such as a user's home address or neighborhood, from user-generated images, including selfies captured in private settings. To formalize and evaluate these risks, we propose a three-level visual privacy risk framework that categorizes image content based on contextual sensitivity and potential for location inference. We further introduce DoxBench, a curated dataset of 500 real-world images reflecting diverse privacy scenarios. Our evaluation across 11 advanced MLRMs and MLLMs demonstrates that these models consistently outperform non-expert humans in geolocation inference and can effectively leak location-related private information. This significantly lowers the barrier for adversaries to obtain users' sensitive geolocation information. We further analyze and identify two primary factors contributing to this vulnerability: (1) MLRMs exhibit strong reasoning capabilities by leveraging visual clues in combination with their internal world knowledge; and (2) MLRMs frequently rely on privacy-related visual clues for inference without any built-in mechanisms to suppress or avoid such usage. To better understand and demonstrate real-world attack feasibility, we propose GeoMiner, a collaborative attack framework that decomposes the prediction process into two stages: clue extraction and reasoning to improve geolocation performance while introducing a novel attack perspective. Our findings highlight the urgent need to reassess inference-time privacy risks in MLRMs to better protect users' sensitive information.
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