arxivcs.AIcs.CR2026-07-01
HARC: Coupling Harmfulness and Refusal Directions for Robust Safety Alignment
Shei Pern Chua, Hao Wu, Qianli Ma, Fangzhao Wu
Understanding how aligned LLMs internally represent safety is critical for diagnosing alignment vulnerabilities, as it explains why jailbreaks succeed and informs the design of robust alignment strategies. Prior work shows that aligned LLMs encode harmfulness and refusal as separ…