META-IR: Meta-Introspective Reasoning for Adaptive Safety Alignment in LLM
Mahabubur Rahman Miraj, Hongyu Huang, Nankun Mu, Chao Chen, Shanqin Yi
原文摘要
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.
cs.AI