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arXiv · 2501.13677

HumorReject: Decoupling LLM Safety from Refusal Prefix via A Little Humor

Zihui Wu·Haichang Gao·Jiacheng Luo·Zhaoxiang Liu
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Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly rely on explicit refusal prefixes for safety, making them vulnerable to prefix injection attacks. We introduce HumorReject, a novel data-driven approach that reimagines LLM safety by decoupling it from refusal prefixes through humor as an indirect refusal strategy. Rather than explicitly rejecting harmful instructions, HumorReject responds with contextually appropriate humor that naturally defuses potentially dangerous requests. Our approach effectively addresses common "over-defense" issues while demonstrating superior robustness against various attack vectors. Our findings suggest that improvements in training data design can be as important as the alignment algorithm itself in achieving effective LLM safety. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/wooozihui/HumorReject.

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Zihui Wu, Haichang Gao, Jiacheng Luo, Zhaoxiang Liu. 2025-01-23. HumorReject: Decoupling LLM Safety from Refusal Prefix via A Little Humor. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13677

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