META-IR: Meta-Introspective Reasoning for Adaptive Safety Alignment in LLM

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks and harmful-content prompts, particularly under adversarial distribution shifts where static alignment pipelines fail to generalize. Although introspective methods such as STAIR strengthen refusal consistency, they depend on fixed self-evaluation policies that cannot rapidly adapt to evolving manipulation strategies. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduces META-IR, a meta-introspective reasoning framework that enhances safety alignment through meta-learning-driven adaptation. It employs a dual-loop architecture: an inner introspective loop that performs structured risk analysis, self-assessment, and reflective correction via SI-MCTS, and an outer meta-learning loop that optimizes the introspection policy across diverse jailbreak task families to enable rapid generalization to unseen attacks. A dynamic jailbreak simulation module further exposes the model to progressively harder adversarial prompts, enabling continual self-improvement without human supervision. Experiments across multiple models (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and Qwen-2-7B-Instruct) and a broad suite of safety, helpfulness, generalization, and introspection metrics demonstrate that META-IR substantially improves adaptation speed, robustness, and reasoning stability compared with all baseline models. These results establish META-IR as an effective pathway toward building LLMs capable of sustained, adaptive safety alignment under dynamic and evolving threat environments.

arXiv comment6 pages, 5 figures. Accepted at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME 2026), Bangkok, Thailand. Source code: https://github.com/Miraj-Rahman-AI/Meta-IR. Supplementary material is included in the ancillary files