arXiv AI

Robust Is Salient: An Informed Adversary Moves the Optimal Signal onto the Salience Pole

The paper investigates how an informed adversary can influence the optimal signal in a constrained signalling channel. It finds that the adversary‑robust optimum aligns with the salience pole on most items, differing only on a small subset where the salience‑to‑Bayes coordinate is undefined. The study demonstrates that as the adversary’s persuasion budget increases, the optimal signal shifts from a posterior‑maximizing to a margin‑maximizing strategy, and provides a diagnostic check for evaluating adversary‑awareness.

arXiv AI
Jun 30

Safety from Honesty in a Disinterested AI Predictor

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 28

Safety from Honesty in a Disinterested AI Predictor

As AI systems become more capable, training procedures that optimize for downstream outcomes risk introducing implicit agency: goal-directed behavior that designers never specified. We present a formal safety argument for the Scientist AI (SAI) Predictor, trained to approximate the Bayesian posterior conditioned on a dataset of "epistemically contextualized" natural-language statements.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Benchmarking Factual Robustness of LLMs via Multi-conversation Persuasion

The paper introduces the SAST-IR framework to evaluate large language models’ robustness against persuasion attacks in a memory‑less setting, revealing a flaw called "Refusal Inertia" that masks true vulnerability. Using the CP‑Agent and a custom CounterFact‑Strict dataset, the authors demonstrate that simple, diverse attack strategies achieve a 96% success rate, while complex attacks often trigger defensive compliance. The study highlights severe brittleness in current state‑of‑the‑art models when deprived of conversation history.

By Zhuoang Cai
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Delegating Authorization to Misaligned Agents: Coalitional Alignment and Safe Control

The paper studies how to safely delegate action approval to multiple AI reviewers when the reviewers themselves may be misaligned. It introduces a weaker condition—k‑robust coalitional alignment—under which a threshold rule that tolerates up to k disapprovals guarantees that the principal’s expected utility is at least as good as a baseline policy. The authors extend this characterization to sequential decision‑making in discounted MDPs and show that full‑panel coverage of reward functions ensures safety in Nash equilibria, while more permissive thresholds can lead to unsafe outcomes. Experiments demonstrate that collective review can remain sound even when individual reviewers are not fully aligned, provided some disapprovals are allowed.

By Natalie Collina, Surbhi Goel, Aaron Roth, Sikata Bela Sengupta
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Rules Before Oracles: Auditable, User-Configurable Argument Selection for Deliberative Polling

The paper proposes a transparent, user‑configurable rule for selecting arguments in deliberative polls, replacing opaque learned rankers. It formalises argument selection over bipolar justification sets, introduces seven civic recommender criteria, and presents a one‑hop reversed endorsement flow rule that meets them. Experiments on 17,000 simulated runs show the rule performs comparably to random on coverage but outperforms other methods on endorsement mass and robustness under adversarial pressure.

By Muntaser Syed, Markus Zanker, Marius Silaghi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

LODESTAR: Trustworthy Entropy Is Navigated, Not Merely Measured -- Reinforced Polarizer Keeps a Frozen LLM from Being Confidently Misled by the Wrong Evidence

arXiv:2608. 11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.

By Po-Jen Ko, Che-Cheng Wu, Hung-Chun Hsu, Li-Yang Chang, Chuan-Ju Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Truthful AI Advisors: A Pre-Specified Benchmark for Large Language Model Honesty Under Preference Misalignment

arXiv:2606. 01456v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as advisors whose objective is not aligned with the user's: recommenders optimize for engagement, sales assistants for purchases, negotiation agents for concessions.

By Hamidreza Hasani Balyani, Seyed Pouyan Mousavi Davoudi, Alireza Amiri-Margavi, Amin Gholami Davodi, Arshia Gharagozlou
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

When Offline Evaluation Misleads: A Diagnostic Protocol for Reward and Policy Selection in Delayed-Feedback Contextual Bandits

arXiv:2608. 11560v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Personalizing marketing messages with contextual multi-armed bandits (CMABs) drives real business value, yet the objective that ultimately matters - a downstream conversion - is observed only weeks later, too late to drive online learning.

By Sang Su Lee, Vineeth Loganathan, Shishir Dash, Vijay Raghavan