Before the Last Token: Diagnosing Final-Token Safety Probe Failures

arXiv:2605.12726v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Final-token safety probes monitor a single hidden state after prompt prefill, but jailbreak prompts can contain probe-visible unsafe evidence distributed across earlier user-token representations that is missed by this readout. We study this prefill-time failure mode using SafeSwitch-style probes trained only on clean harmful and benign prompts across three instruction-tuned LLMs. The probes achieve high recall on clean harmful prompts, but miss many jailbreaks and can produce false positives on safety-adjacent benign prompts. Subspace analys

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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