Polarity Blindness in LLM Safety: A Systematic Study of Negation, Antonym Substitution, and Adversarial Framing

arXiv:2610.27908v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Negation remains a persistent challenge for language models across NLP tasks and modalities. We show that this weakness can undermine LLM safety guardrails through a structural vulnerability we term polarity blindness: the failure to recognize harmful intent after polarity-altering linguistic transformations. We study two forms of polarity inversion: grammatical negation and antonym replacement, and use synonym replacement as a polarity-preserving control. We further test whether an adversarial textual wrapper amplifies these failures. Using a

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