Into the Gray Zone: Domain Contexts Can Blur LLM Safety Boundaries
Ki Sen Hung, Xi Yang Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Chang Liu University of Science and Technology of China, Haoran Li, Kejiang Chen University of Science and Technology of China, Changxuan Fan, Tsun On Kwok The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Weiming Zhang University of Science and Technology of China 等 10 位作者
A central goal of LLM alignment is to balance helpfulness with harmlessness, yet these objectives conflict when the same knowledge serves both legitimate and malicious purposes. This tension is amplified by context-sensitive alignment: we observe that domain-specific contexts (e.g., chemistry) selectively relax defenses for domain-relevant harmful knowledge, while safety-research contexts (e.g., jailbreak studies) trigger broader relaxation spanning all harm categories. To systematically exploit this vulnerability, we propose Jargon, a framework combining safety-research contexts with multi-turn adversarial interactions that achieves attack success rates exceeding 93% across seven frontier models, including GPT-5.2, Claude-4.5, and Gemini-3, substantially outperforming existing methods. Activation space analysis reveals that Jargon queries occupy an intermediate region between benign and harmful inputs, a gray zone where refusal decisions become unreliable. To mitigate this vulnerability, we design a policy-guided safeguard that steers models toward helpful yet harmless responses, and internalize this capability through alignment fine-tuning, reducing attack success rates while preserving helpfulness.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表