Target-free Latent Safety Alignment

Luoyu Chen, Weiqi Wang, Chenhan Zhang, Zhiyi Tian, Yuxian Huang +1

Large language models (LLMs) remain highly vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that induce harmful behaviors and circumvent safety alignment. To defend against such attacks, adversarial training paradigms have been proposed to first simulate failure modes and then train the model to correct them, yielding promising improvements in safety alignment. However, these methods typically construct adversarial samples either by encouraging fixed harmful target completions or by performing targeted activation ablation derived from fixed benign--harmful data pairs. As a result, the generated adversarial samples tend to induce homogeneous harmful behaviors that poorly reflect the diversity of behaviors elicited by real-world jailbreak attacks. This behavior-level narrowness fundamentally limits their robustness. To address this issue, we propose a target-free adversarial training framework that generates adversarial samples in an unsupervised manner. By amplifying and diversifying behavior-level shifts in the model's latent space, our approach produces semantically diverse adversarial samples that induce a wide range of harmful behaviors. This expanded behavioral coverage exposes more diverse…