arXiv Machine Learning

Mechanisms of Introspective Awareness

arXiv:2603. 21396v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work has shown that LLMs can sometimes detect when steering vectors are injected into their residual stream and identify the injected concept -- a phenomenon termed "introspective awareness.

arXiv AI
3d ago

Don't Inoculate Everything: Stratified Inoculation Prompting Narrows Backdoor Triggers and Preserves Desired Traits

arXiv:2609.35356v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning can teach language models undesired behaviours alongside desired ones. Inoculation prompting (IP) aims to limit unwanted gen...

By Kajetan Dymkiewicz, Tim Farrelly, Adam Prada, Ishaan Panigrahi, Srishti Gureja, Helen Yannakoudakis, Robert Mullins, Victor Gillioz, Daniel Tan, Maxime Rich\'e
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Can LLMs Reliably Self-Report Adversarial Prefills, and How?

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can reliably detect when their own responses have been manipulated by adversarial prefill attacks. Across ten instruction‑tuned LLMs ranging from 3B to 70B parameters and four safety benchmarks, none consistently recognized compromised outputs, with models claiming intent on prefilled responses at an average of 25.3%. The research identifies that introspective signals mainly arise from safety reasoning and refusal, and that training to improve introspection can paradoxically increase attack success, underscoring the fragility of LLM self‑reporting in safety contexts.

By Quang Minh Nguyen, Uzair Ahmed, Taegyoon Kim