Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable capabilities but remain vulnerable to adversarial “jailbreak” attacks designed to bypass safety guardrails. Current safety alignment methods depend heavily on static external red teaming, utilizing fixed defense prompts or pre-collected adversarial datasets. This leads to a rigid defense that overfits known patterns and fails to generalize to novel, sophisticated threats. To address this critical limitation, we propose empowering the model to be its own red teamer, capable of achieving autonomous and evolving adversarial attacks. Specifically, we introduce Safety Self- Play (SSP), a system that utilizes a single LLM to act concurrently as both the Attacker (generating jailbreaks) and the Defender (refusing harmful requests) within a unified Reinforcement Learning (RL) loop, dynamically evolving attack strategies to uncover vulnerabilities while simultaneously strengthening defense mechanisms. To ensure the Defender effectively addresses critical safety issues during the self-play, we introduce an advanced Reflective Experience Replay Mechanism, which uses an experience pool accumulated throughout the process. The mechanism employs a Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) sampling strategy to focus on failure cases with low rewards, helping the model learn from past hard mistakes while balancing exploration and exploitation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our SSP approach autonomously evolves robust defense capabilities, significantly outperforming baselines trained on static adversarial datasets and establishing a new benchmark for proactive safety alignment.

Medical language models are increasingly evaluated on open-ended clinical reasoning, where good responses must combine factual recall, evidence integration, decision making, and synthesis. However, standard reward models compress these different standards into one reward score, while medical RL with answer keys mainly rewards multiple-choice correctness. This makes it difficult to improve non-multiple-choice medical reasoning without losing performance on exam-style benchmarks. In this paper, we propose a Prefix Mixture-of-Experts Reward Model (Prefix-MoE RM), which routes each query-response pair across recall, analysis, decision, and synthesis prefix experts, softly fuses their trainable prefixes, and then predicts one reward score. The MoE structure allows different abilities to use different scoring experts to reduce reward conflicts, while continuous prefixes provide a more expressive conditioning signal than fixed hard prompts. The reward model is trained on non-multiple-choice medical preferences and then used in mixed-data curriculum GRPO, where multiple-choice prompts provide additional answer-key feedback. On held-out reward-model evaluation, Prefix-MoE RM improves pairwise accuracy from 79.8 to 93.0 over a shared RM; with the RL pipeline fixed, replacing it with a shared RM or soft expert-head MoE lowers HealthBench from 43.8 to 24.8 and 34.6, respectively. With Qwen3-8B as the policy backbone, the full system outperforms the larger Qwen3-32B base on MedXpertQA and HealthBench, while the Qwen3-32B version reaches 50.1 HealthBench and 4.55 LLMEval-Med, remaining competitive with stronger closed general models and retaining an advantage on non-multiple-choice metrics.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values often degrades their general capabilities, known as the alignment tax. Existing methods mitigate this by balancing dual objectives, which heavily rely on massive general-purpose data or auxiliary reward models.

In this paper, we argue that because safety features are inherently sparse within the output distribution, alignment requires localized modifications rather than global trade-offs. To this end, we propose SafeSteer, which performs on-policy distillation confined to safety tokens. First, we construct a safety teacher via activation steering. Based on this teacher, we develop a safety token selection algorithm. Consequently, SafeSteer restricts the reverse KL penalty to these tokens during training to preserve general capabilities.

Experimental results across diverse models show that our SafeSteer significantly outperforms existing methods on 7 safety benchmarks, with only minimal degradation on 5 general capability benchmarks. Notably, SafeSteer requires only 100 harmful samples without using any general-purpose data, less than 1% of what previous baselines used, considerably reducing alignment cost.

Current defenses for Large Language Models (LLMs) often suffer from a ”memory gap”: parameter-modifying methods are computationally rigid, while inference-time filters cannot retain or reuse defense knowledge across interactions. To address this, we propose SafetyMem, a novel framework that secures LLMs through a dual-component safety memory system. SafetyMem consists of Semantic Safety Memory (SSM), which consolidates diverse jailbreak attempts into a structured knowledge base of attack patterns, and Episodic Safety Memory (ESM), which maintains an evolving set of procedural rules refined from historical detection failures. Unlike static defenses, SafetyMem allows the model to ”remember” and adapt to emerging adversarial strategies without parameter retraining. To further enhance robustness, we introduce an adversarial memory expansion mechanism that proactively generates challenging variants to solidify these memories. Experiments on standard and stealthy jailbreak benchmarks show that SafetyMem substantially reduces attack success rates while preserving efficiency and interpretability, consistently outperforming state-of-the-art baselines across multiple LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are susceptible to generating harmful content when prompted with carefully crafted inputs, a vulnerability known as LLM jailbreaking. As LLMs become more powerful, studying jailbreak methods is critical to enhancing security and aligning models with human values. Traditionally, jailbreak techniques have relied on suffix addition or prompt templates, but these methods suffer from limited attack diversity. This paper introduces DiffusionAttacker, an end-to-end generative approach for jailbreak rewriting inspired by diffusion models. Our method employs a sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) text diffusion model as a generator, conditioning on the original prompt and guiding the denoising process with a novel attack loss. Unlike previous approaches that use autoregressive LLMs to generate jailbreak prompts, which limit the modification of already generated tokens and restrict the rewriting space, DiffusionAttacker utilizes a seq2seq diffusion model, allowing more flexible token modifications. This approach preserves the semantic content of the original prompt while producing harmful content. Additionally, we leverage the Gumbel-Softmax technique to make the sampling process from the diffusion model’s output distribution differentiable, eliminating the need for iterative token search. Extensive experiments on Advbench and Harmbench demonstrate that DiffusionAttacker outperforms previous methods across various evaluation metrics, including attack success rate (ASR), fluency, and diversity.

The safety defense methods of Large language models (LLMs) stays limited because the dangerous prompts are manually curated to just few known attack types, which fails to keep pace with emerging varieties. Recent studies found that attaching suffixes to harmful instructions can hack the defense of LLMs and lead to dangerous outputs. However, similar to traditional text adversarial attacks, this approach, while effective, is limited by the challenge of the discrete tokens. This gradient based discrete optimization attack requires over 100,000 LLM calls, and due to the unreadable of adversarial suffixes, it can be relatively easily penetrated by common defense methods such as perplexity filters.To cope with this challenge, in this paper, we propose an Adversarial Suffix Embedding Translation Framework (ASETF), aimed at transforming continuous adversarial suffix embeddings into coherent and understandable text. This method greatly reduces the computational overhead during the attack process and helps to automatically generate multiple adversarial samples, which can be used as data to strengthen LLM’s security defense. Experimental evaluations were conducted on Llama2, Vicuna, and other prominent LLMs, employing harmful directives sourced from the Advbench dataset.The results indicate that our method significantly reduces the computation time of adversarial suffixes and achieves a much better attack success rate than existing techniques, while significantly enhancing the textual fluency of the prompts. In addition, our approach can be generalized into a broader method for generating transferable adversarial suffixes that can successfully attack multiple LLMs, even black-box LLMs, such as ChatGPT and Gemini.