2026
Robust Harmful Features Under Jailbreak Attacks: Mechanistic Evidence from Attention Head Specialization in Large Language Models
ICML 2026oral
Jailbreak attacks bypass LLM safety alignment, yet their mechanisms remain poorly understood. We provide evidence that attacks do not eliminate safety features but selectively suppress specific attention heads. We identify two functionally differentiated types: **Adversarially Compromised Heads (ACH…