Recent advances in general-purpose AI underscore the urgent need to align AI systems with human goals and values. Yet, the lack of a clear, shared understanding of what constitutes "alignment" limits meaningful progress and cross-disciplinary collaboration. In this position paper, we argue that the research community should explicitly define and critically reflect on "alignment" to account for the bidirectional and dynamic relationship between humans and AI. Through a systematic review of over 400 papers spanning HCI, NLP, ML, and more, we examine how alignment is currently defined and operationalized. Building on this analysis, we introduce the Bidirectional Human-AI Alignment framework, which not only incorporates traditional efforts to align AI with human values but also introduces the critical, underexplored dimension of aligning humans with AI – supporting cognitive, behavioral, and societal adaptation to rapidly advancing AI technologies. Our findings reveal significant gaps in current literature, especially in long-term interaction design, human value modeling, and mutual understanding. We conclude with three central challenges and actionable recommendations to guide future research toward more nuanced, reciprocal, and human-AI alignment approaches.

Large language model systems face significant security risks from maliciously crafted messages that aim to overwrite the system's original instructions or leak private data. To study this problem, we organized a capture-the-flag competition at IEEE SaTML 2024, where the flag is a secret string in the LLM system prompt. The competition was organized in two phases. In the first phase, teams developed defenses to prevent the model from leaking the secret. During the second phase, teams were challenged to extract the secrets hidden for defenses proposed by the other teams. This report summarizes the main insights from the competition. Notably, we found that all defenses were bypassed at least once, highlighting the difficulty of designing a successful defense and the necessity for additional research to protect LLM systems. To foster future research in this direction, we compiled a dataset with over 137k multi-turn attack chats and open-sourced the platform.