Are LLMs Safe Beyond Text: Do Emojis Expose Gaps in Safety Evaluation

M P V S Gopinadh

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arXiv · 2608.18164

Are LLMs Safe Beyond Text: Do Emojis Expose Gaps in Safety Evaluation

M P V S Gopinadh

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Abstract

Safety evaluations of large language models (LLMs) predominantly rely on text-based adversarial prompts, potentially overlooking vulnerabilities arising from alternative input representations. This work examines emoji-augmented prompts as a test case for this gap, evaluating 50 prompts across four open-source LLMs (Mistral 7B, Qwen 2 7B, Gemma 2 9B, Llama 3 8B). Results show substantial variation in robustness: Gemma 2 9B and Mistral 7B exhibit non-zero success rates (10%), Llama 3 8B 6%, while Qwen 2 7B shows complete resistance (0% success rate). A chi-square test ($\chi^2 = 32.94, p < 0.001$) confirms significant differences in outcome distributions. These findings indicate that robustness is sensitive to input representation, and that evaluations restricted to standard text prompts may underrepresent model vulnerabilities.

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M P V S Gopinadh. 2026-08-15. Are LLMs Safe Beyond Text: Do Emojis Expose Gaps in Safety Evaluation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.18164

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