# Silent Alarm: A J-Space Protocol for Comparing Danger Recognition Across Models and Quantization Levels

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12792 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12792/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Safety alignment, refusal and guardrails, one of 12 directions in LLM safety and security.
- Builds on 17 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM safety and security / [Safety alignment, refusal and guardrails](https://mlsanity.com/safety/safety-alignment-refusal-and-guardrails/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [QLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14314/) (2023)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [HarmBench: A Standardized Evaluation Framework for Automated Red Teaming and Robust Refusal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04249/) (2024)
- [Fine-tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When Users Do Not Intend To!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03693/) (2023)
- [Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11717/) (2024)
- [LLM.int8(): 8-bit Matrix Multiplication for Transformers at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.07339/) (2022)
- [Eliciting Latent Predictions from Transformers with the Tuned Lens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08112/) (2023)
- [JailbreakBench: An Open Robustness Benchmark for Jailbreaking Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01318/) (2024)
- [XSTest: A Test Suite for Identifying Exaggerated Safety Behaviours in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01263/) (2023)
- [A StrongREJECT for Empty Jailbreaks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10260/) (2024)
- [Towards Best Practices of Activation Patching in Language Models: Metrics and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16042/) (2023)
- [Does Localization Inform Editing? Surprising Differences in Causality-Based Localization vs. Knowledge Editing in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04213/) (2023)
- [LLMs Encode Harmfulness and Refusal Separately](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11878/) (2025)
- [Decoding Compressed Trust: Scrutinizing the Trustworthiness of Efficient LLMs Under Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15447/) (2024)
- [Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17633/) (2024)
- [Quantized Delta Weight Is Safety Keeper](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19530/) (2024)
- [Towards Understanding and Improving Refusal in Compressed Models via Mechanistic Interpretability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.04215/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Gathered, Not Admitted: How Attention Brings a Latent Variable into Verbalizable Form](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.15022/) (2026)
- [From Latent Space to Jacobian Space: Measuring, Evading, and Training Against Safety-Content Accessibility](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.04316/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Jailbreak-robustness research typically evaluates safety through generated responses using an LLM-as-judge approach. Such evaluations, however, are sensitive to the benchmark's grading procedure and capture only observed behavior on a given set of attacks, without directly revealing the hidden fragility of the underlying safety mechanisms. This work proposes JADR (Jacobian Assessment of Danger Recognition), a protocol that measures a model's internal representation through Jacobian space (J-space, a recently proposed workspace of verbalizable concepts) before the first response token is generated. For every prompt and layer we record the top-k J-space tokens; these are grouped into six behavioral scenario axes and compared between a danger sample based on StrongREJECT and a safe control drawn from XSTest and OKTest. The method does not call on an external judge model: the computation runs entirely locally, on the activations of the model under evaluation, which lets us compare both different models against each other and modifications of a single model - quantization and fine-tuning in particular - on the same terms. The final comparison rests on the proposed SafetyAUC metric, complemented with bootstrap confidence intervals. The protocol is applied to six models (Qwen3-1.7B, Qwen3-4B, Qwen3-8B, Qwen3-Uncensored-4B, Qwen3-SafeRL-4B, Gemma 2 9B) across three weight-representation regimes - BF16, INT8, and INT4 - and checked against an independent behavioral evaluation with the StrongREJECT grader. The metric separates models with a strong versus a weak internal safety mechanism with statistical significance and captures substantively different effects across quantization regimes.