arXiv:2608.03201cs.AI2026-08

安全模型被拒绝提示误导,小改动就能骗过检测

When Refusal Looks Safe: The Refusal-Cue Shortcut in Safety Guard Models

论文配图:When Refusal Looks Safe: The Refusal-Cue Shortcut in Safety Guard Models
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 发现安全模型依赖拒绝词作为错误信号
  • 插入拒绝词可让有害内容伪装成无害,误检率降79%
  • 无需重训即可通过抑制特定神经元修复漏洞

安全防护模型通常通过标注的问答对进行监督微调。我们审计了两个常用数据集WildGuardMix和GR-Train,发现有害提示的回复中,拒绝表达几乎只与无害标签共现。这种不平衡导致‘拒绝提示捷径’:在有害回复中加入拒绝提示,可使模型判定从有害转为无害。该现象不仅影响基于这些数据集训练的模型,也影响未公开训练数据的LlamaGuard3和Qwen3Guard。捷径在不同回复位置均存在,且在同系列小模型中更强。为此,我们采用稀疏互补掩码作为轻量级后处理干预,识别并抑制少数与捷径相关的注意力头和MLP神经元,无需重新训练。在两个主要基准上,该方法使响应开头的误检失败降低约79%,同时保持正常检测性能。尽管仅在单个位置优化,效果仍可迁移至未知位置和数据集,表明不同位置的捷径表现部分由共享内部组件驱动。进一步分析显示,捷径依赖与真实拒绝识别在功能上部分可分离,抑制捷径后仍能保留对真实拒绝的识别能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Safety guards are widely used to filter harmful content and are typically trained via supervised fine-tuning on labeled prompt-response pairs. We audit two widely used safety-guard training datasets, WildGuardMix and GR-Train, and find that among responses to harmful prompts, refusal expressions co-occur almost exclusively with unharmful labels. This imbalance motivates what we term the refusal-cue shortcut: inserting a refusal cue into a harmful response could flip the guard's verdict from harmful to unharmful. The shortcut affects not only guards trained on these datasets but also officially released models such as LlamaGuard3 and Qwen3Guard whose training data is undisclosed. It persists across response positions and is generally stronger in smaller variants within a family. To mitigate it, we adapt sparse complementary masking as a lightweight post-hoc intervention that identifies and suppresses a small set of shortcut-associated attention heads and MLP neurons without retraining. On two primary benchmarks, the intervention achieves an approximately 79% relative reduction in response-initial detection failures induced by refusal cues, while preserving standard detection performance. Although optimized using cues at a single response position, the suppression effect transfers to unseen positions and datasets, suggesting that shortcut manifestations across positions are partly mediated by shared internal components. Further analysis provides evidence that shortcut reliance and legitimate refusal recognition are partially functionally separable, as suppressing the shortcut broadly preserves the guard's ability to recognize genuine refusals.

安全模型对抗攻击提示欺骗

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