Latent Instruction Representation Alignment: defending against jailbreaks, backdoors and undesired knowledge in LLMs
arXiv cs.LG / 4/14/2026
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Key Points
- The paper proposes Latent Instruction Representation Alignment (LIRA) to defend LLMs against jailbreaks, backdoors, and undesired knowledge by changing how the model interprets instructions rather than only learning from action outcomes.
- LIRA trains models for better cross-scenario generalization, and the authors further improve it using an internally adversarial training algorithm.
- The reported results include blocking more than 99% of PEZ jailbreak attacks, removing an insecure code backdoor, and achieving “optimal forgetting” on WMDP cyber with negligible degradation of benign capabilities.
- The work positions instruction-representation alignment as a more generalizable alternative to prior approaches that primarily condition training on model behavior under malicious prompts.
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