collaborators

6 papers

cs.LG2026

Discovering Universal Activation Directions for PII Leakage in Language Models

Leo Marchyok, Zachary Coalson, Sungho Keum +2

Modern language models exhibit rich internal structure, yet little is known about how privacy-sensitive behaviors, such as personally identifiable information (PII) leakage, are re…

cs.LG2026

Fail-Closed Alignment for Large Language Models

Zachary Coalson, Beth Sohler, Aiden Gabriel +1

We identify a structural weakness in current large language model (LLM) alignment: modern refusal mechanisms are fail-open. While existing approaches encode refusal behaviors acros…

cs.LG2025

Hard Work Does Not Always Pay Off: Poisoning Attacks on Neural Architecture Search

Zachary Coalson, Huazheng Wang, Qingyun Wu +1

We study the robustness of data-centric methods to find neural network architectures, known as neural architecture search (NAS), against data poisoning. To audit this robustness, w…

cs.LG2025

IF-GUIDE: Influence Function-Guided Detoxification of LLMs

Zachary Coalson, Juhan Bae, Nicholas Carlini +1

We study how training data contributes to the emergence of toxic behaviors in large language models. Most prior work on reducing model toxicity adopts reactive approaches, such as…

cs.CR2025

PrisonBreak: Jailbreaking Large Language Models with at Most Twenty-Five Targeted Bit-flips

Zachary Coalson, Jeonghyun Woo, Chris S. Lin +8

We study a new vulnerability in commercial-scale safety-aligned large language models (LLMs): their refusal to generate harmful responses can be broken by flipping only a few bits…

cs.CV2025

Harnessing Input-Adaptive Inference for Efficient VLN

Dongwoo Kang, Akhil Perincherry, Zachary Coalson +3

An emerging paradigm in vision-and-language navigation (VLN) is the use of history-aware multi-modal transformer models. Given a language instruction, these models process observat…