2 papers
cs.CR2026
CircuitBreak: Pruning a Sparse Safety Circuit of Neurons
Jincheng Ying, Li Wenlin, Wencheng Yang +1
White-box neuron pruning has shown that refusal in large language models (LLMs) can depend on a small, removable set of feed-forward (FFN) channels. Existing attacks either need ca…
cs.CR2026
Mask2Shield: Strengthening LLM Safety against Neuron-Pruning Attacks
Ying JinCheng, Minghui Xu, Yinhao Xiao +2
Large language models (LLMs) are safety-aligned before deployment to reduce harmful content generation. Yet neuron-level pruning attacks show that refusal can depend on a small set…