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Toward Safer Diffusion Language Models: Discovery and Mitigation of Priming Vulnerability

Authors: Shojiro Yamabe, Jun Sakuma

Published: 2025-10-01

arXiv ID: 2510.00565v1

Added to Library: 2025-10-03 04:04 UTC

Red Teaming

📄 Abstract

Diffusion language models (DLMs) generate tokens in parallel through iterative denoising, which can reduce latency and enable bidirectional conditioning. However, the safety risks posed by jailbreak attacks that exploit this inference mechanism are not well understood. In this paper, we reveal that DLMs have a critical vulnerability stemming from their iterative denoising process and propose a countermeasure. Specifically, our investigation shows that if an affirmative token for a harmful query appears at an intermediate step, subsequent denoising can be steered toward a harmful response even in aligned models. As a result, simply injecting such affirmative tokens can readily bypass the safety guardrails. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the vulnerability allows existing optimization-based jailbreak attacks to succeed on DLMs. Building on this analysis, we propose a novel safety alignment method tailored to DLMs that trains models to generate safe responses from contaminated intermediate states that contain affirmative tokens. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method significantly mitigates the vulnerability with minimal impact on task performance. Furthermore, our method improves robustness against conventional jailbreak attacks. Our work underscores the need for DLM-specific safety research.

🔍 Key Points

  • The paper identifies a critical vulnerability in Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) known as the priming vulnerability, where affirmative tokens in the denoising process can lead to harmful responses even in safety-aligned models.
  • A novel safety alignment method called Recovery Alignment (RA) is proposed, which trains models to recover safe responses from contaminated intermediate states containing affirmative tokens, significantly mitigating priming vulnerability without degrading performance.
  • Experimental results demonstrate that RA substantially improves robustness against both priming vulnerabilities and conventional jailbreak attacks across multiple models and datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results.
  • The study emphasizes the need for DLM-specific safety research, indicating that existing safety measures for autoregressive models (ARMs) do not adequately protect DLMs from emerging vulnerabilities.

💡 Why This Paper Matters

This paper represents a significant step forward in understanding and addressing safety risks associated with Diffusion Language Models (DLMs), a rapidly evolving area in NLP. By revealing specific vulnerabilities and proposing effective countermeasures such as Recovery Alignment, the authors contribute to safer AI deployments, thereby addressing critical concerns about misuse and safety in AI generative models. Their findings are especially relevant given the escalating sophistication of jailbreak attacks and the need for robust mitigation techniques.

🎯 Why It's Interesting for AI Security Researchers

The research is vital for AI security researchers as it addresses newly uncovered vulnerabilities in Diffusion Language Models, a popular class of generative models. The techniques and findings discussed in the paper provide crucial insights into how vulnerabilities can be exploited and countered, informing the development of more secure AI systems. This paper adds to the growing body of knowledge necessary for safeguarding AI applications against adversarial attacks, making it a key reference for security-focused investigations in AI.

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