A large-scale assessment of the effectiveness and robustness of these automated pipelines is conducted by evaluating five widely used benchmark suites across 26 open-source SLMs under a unified judging rubric, which reveals a capability-safety confound that mixes model capability with apparent safety.
Abstract
Small Language Models (SLMs) are increasingly deployed in resource-constrained, privacy-sensitive settings, where safety and bias failures can cause security and societal risks. However, existing AI safety\slash security\slash compliance benchmarks are designed for large language models that may not transfer reliably to SLMs. We therefore ask: Can these benchmarks effectively and reliably evaluate SLMs? To answer this question, we conduct a large-scale assessment of the effectiveness and robustness of these automated pipelines by evaluating five widely used benchmark suites across 26 open-source SLMs under a unified judging rubric, which assigns a score of 0, 1, or 0.5 to harmful, safe, or ambiguous/irrelevant responses, respectively. Across the benchmarks, ambiguous judgments dominate and correlate with prompt complexity and model architecture, indicating that {\em LLM-centric safety benchmarks are insufficient as standalone evidence for SLM safety assessment}. In general, the ambiguity rate increases with lexical density, output perplexity, and output length and decreases with lexical sophistication, self-coherence, and reply-prompt similarity. This reveals a capability-safety confound that mixes model capability with apparent safety. Since ambiguity is prevalent, aggregate mean-score leaderboards are mathematically brittle: model rankings change significantly under reasonable ambiguity treatments, even when the underlying outputs remain unchanged.
It is connected to a documented, persistent asymmetry in multilingual jailbreak robustness (single-turn attacks largely mitigated, multi-turn attacks still effective), arguing that this asymmetry is structurally consistent with where the audit finds training and evaluation data thinnest.
: Large language models are increasingly being deployed in safety-critical domains, yet remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that circumvent safety alignments. This systematic review synthesizes empirical jailbreak research published between 2024 and 2025, using a PRISMA-guided search protocol, followed by BERTopic-based topic modeling. The analysis identifies eight main jailbreak categories: optimization-based, ge-netic/evolutionary, iterative refinement, semantic/persuasion-based, decomposition, context/generation-level, visual/encoding and fuzzing attacks, and characterizes their effectiveness, efficiency, and transferability across open-source and proprietary models, including Llama-2/3, Vicuna, GPT-3.5/4, Claude, Gemini, and DeepSeek-V3. Results show that simple configuration and context-level attacks can match the near-perfect attack success rates of sophisticated white-box optimization methods on models such as Llama-2, while requiring far fewer queries and no parameter access, highlighting a gap between research focus and practical threat severity. The review further identifies five recurring vulnerability mechanisms: representation-level gaps, execution-priority manipulation, semantic fragmentation, gradient-space exploitation and persuasion susceptibility, and documents family-specific vulnerability patterns, with open-source Llama-based models consistently more exposed than safety-enhanced architectures such as Claude. Diverse methods, uneven focus on models and publication bias limit how broadly results apply. Nonetheless, the review reveals that weaknesses in safety alignment persist across successive LLM generations, urging that effective defenses must address all eight attack categories rather than isolated techniques.
Meda Račaitytė, Hélder Bastos, R. Ribeiro et al.· International Conference on...· 0 citations
SkillSafe-Bench is introduced, a controlled benchmark that scores skill-merged models on static refusal, adaptive jailbreak robustness, and capability retention under a conservative two-judge AND rule, and the static effect of merging is base-conditional.
Overall, the results reveal a persistent multilingual safety gap, and suggest that future progress will require culturally grounded benchmarks, participatory data collection, balanced multilingual pre-training, and scalable multilingual alignment methods.
Valdini Douglace Lemofouet, Blessing Ngozi Uzor, Paula Chikaodinaka Anyanwu et al.· 0 citations
This work investigates whether LLMs can accurately judge functional equivalence across different programming languages in human-written code, a setting that requires deeper reasoning beyond superficial similarity, and identifies a difficulty-dependent breakdown in equivalence judgment.
Hui Sun, Anderson G. Uchôa, Rohit Gheyi et al.· 0 citations
DiverValue-Bench is introduced, a population-aware benchmark for evaluating multi-dimensional value alignment across 74 countries/regions and it is shown that lightweight preference-based fine-tuning with Low-Rank Adaptation and Direct Preference Optimization substantially improves in-domain value alignment while yielding consistent out-of-domain gains.
Yao Liang, Dongcheng Zhao, Feifei Zhao et al.· 0 citations
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