The paper introduces the concept of "linguistic illegibility," describing how a large language model’s (LLM) language outputs and extracted linguistic features may not accurately reflect its internal computations. It argues that because LLMs compute primarily in activation spaces, any reliance on linguistic self‑reporting for security—such as chain‑of‑thought monitoring or constitutional self‑critique—cannot be fully reliable. The authors propose taint tracking and other sandboxing techniques that do not depend on the model’s linguistic state as a more robust security foundation.
By James Mickens
arXiv:2607. 15495v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Out of everything the human brain processes, only a small fraction is consciously accessible, in the sense of being available for verbal report, deliberate control, and flexible reasoning.
By Wes Gurnee, Nicholas Sofroniew, Adam Pearce, Mateusz Piotrowski, Isaac Kauvar, Runjin Chen, Anna Soligo, Paul Bogdan, Euan Ong, Rowan Wang, Ben Thompson, David Abrahams, Subhash Kantamneni, Emmanuel Ameisen, Joshua Batson, Jack Lindsey
arXiv:2606. 24267v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing.
By Hyunji Nam, Keertana Chidambaram, Dorottya Demszky, Natasha Jaques
arXiv:2606. 24267v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While in-context learning is generally shown to be effective in Large Language Models (LLMs), bad contexts can cause performance degradation and mode collapse, a phenomenon we call "pigeonholing.
By Hyunji Nam, Keertana Chidambaram, Dorottya Demszky, Natasha Jaques
arXiv:2610.03551v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have reached expert-level performance on competition mathematics largely through the volume of search placed around them:...
By Yanli Wang, Suijin Wang, Xiaopeng Yuan, Haohan Wang
arXiv:2609.22219v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Evaluating an aligned language model by reading its answers assumes the answers carry the distinction the evaluator cares about. We introduce LLM end...
By Fabrizio Davide, Francesco Collova
arXiv:2608.21766v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Both capability and safety benchmarks rest upon the assumption that the behavior of language models undergoing a test is informative about their beha...
By Farzaneh Heidari, Amin Memarian, Guillaume Rabusseau
Large language models are informing decisions with ever-higher stakes. As the consequences of their errors grow, a central question becomes harder to ignore: how much can we trust an individual answer...
arXiv:2606. 29657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems become more capable, training procedures that optimize for downstream outcomes risk introducing implicit agency: goal-directed behavior that designers never specified.
By Yoshua Bengio, Oliver Richardson, Tom\'a\v{s} Gaven\v{c}iak, Michael Cohen, Rory Svarc, Damiano Fornasiere, Gael Gendron, David Hyland, Aton Kamanda, Adam Oberman, Francis Rhys Ward, Anna Gaven\v{c}iak, Jacob Livingston Slosser, Vincent Mai, Iulian Serban, Joumana Ghosn
arXiv:2601. 22588v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as reference-free evaluators via prompting, but this "LLM-as-a-Judge" paradigm is costly, opaque, and sensitive to prompt design.
By Zhuochun Li, Yong Zhang, Ming Li, Yuelyu Ji, Yiming Zeng, Ning Cheng, Yun Zhu, Yanmeng Wang, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Daqing He
arXiv:2606. 08044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) safety has often been evaluated at the behavior level, which provides limited evidence of internal robustness, as these evaluations target outputs rather than representation-level vulnerability under intervention.
By Enyi Jiang, Anders Gj{\o}lbye, Yibo Jacky Zhang, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv:2607. 09697v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing safety mechanisms for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) face a fundamental trade-off between safety and utility.
By Jiayi Li, Kun Zhan