Dissecting the Black Box: Circuit-Level Analysis of LLM Vulnerability Detection

Large language models LLMs can detect software vulnerabilities, but how do they actually identify vulnerable code? We address this question using mechanistic interpretability; analyzing the internal computations of a neural network to understand its reasoning process.Using Circuit Tracer on...

Babel: Jailbreaking Safety Attention Via Obfuscation Distribution Optimized Sampling

Despite rigorous safety alignment, Large Language Models LLMs remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks. Existing black-box methods often rely on heuristic templates or exhaustive trials, lacking mechanistic interpretability and query efficiency. In this study, we investigate an intrinsic...

Jailbreaking the Matrix: Nullspace Steering for Controlled Model Subversion

Large language models remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks -- inputs designed to bypass safety mechanisms and elicit harmful responses -- despite advances in alignment and instruction tuning. We propose Head-Masked Nullspace Steering HMNS, a circuit-level intervention that i identifies attentio...

The Trigger in the Haystack: Extracting and Reconstructing LLM Backdoor Triggers

Detecting whether a model has been poisoned is a longstanding problem in AI security. In this work, we present a practical scanner for identifying sleeper agent-style backdoors in causal language models. Our approach relies on two key findings: first, sleeper agents tend to memorize poisoning dat...

Mechanistic Interpretability in the Presence of Architectural Obfuscation

Architectural obfuscation - e.g., permuting hidden-state tensors, linearly transforming embedding tables, or remapping tokens - has recently gained traction as a lightweight substitute for heavyweight cryptography in privacy-preserving large-language-model LLM inference. While recent work has sho...