The Safety Decision Before the Answer
TL;DR for operators An assistant can become substantially harder to jailbreak when it learns to make an explicit safety decision before answering. In ShallowDefend, Qwen3-8B’s average SAFE score across five benchmarks rises from 46.1% to 93.4% under self-verified reinforcement learning. But its XSB over-refusal rate also increases from 15.6% to 56.8%. The method separates intent assessment, a structured safety commitment, and the final reply. Its self-verified reward checks whether the commitment matches a known harmful or benign training label, eliminating the need for an external LLM judge during optimization. It does not independently verify the generated response. ...