{"paper":{"title":"When Skills Meet Safety: Benchmarking and Characterizing the Adaptive Jailbreak Robustness of Skill-Merged LLMs","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Hongli Shi, Jing Li, Weiwei Hou, Xinran Xu, Yu Ma","submitted_at":"2026-08-09T07:41:06Z","abstract_excerpt":"Model merging has become the default way to give an aligned language model new skills without retraining: a practitioner folds task vectors from math, code, or domain specialists into a safety-aligned base using task arithmetic, TIES, or DARE. This convenience is known to carry a safety cost, but almost all of that evidence rests on static refusal tests: fixed harmful prompts scored for compliance. We argue this is misleading. Because safety alignment is \"shallow,\" concentrated in the first few generated tokens, a merged model's static refusal can stay clean while a real adaptive attack still "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.08542","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2608.08542/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}