arXiv Machine Learning

Abliteration Is Not a Scalpel: Off-Target Effects of Refusal Removal on Decision Disposition Across Model Families

arXiv:2607. 17427v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Abliteration - deleting a model's refusal direction from its weights - is the standard recipe behind popular "uncensored" open-weight models.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Augur: A Synthetic Decision Lab for Rehearsing Reactions to Product and Policy Changes

Augur is a synthetic decision laboratory that simulates how users will react to product and policy changes before they are released. It constructs a typed knowledge graph from change documents, populates a persona market, runs simulations, and produces an auditable decision memo recommending one of five actions. Using a dataset of 50 real episodes (Gold‑50), the authors evaluate the system’s five‑way release verdicts and find that evaluation design, rather than model capability, largely drives performance differences among frontier and open‑weight models.

By Rahul Khedar, Mayank Malhotra, Avinash Karn
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Fool's Gold: Defensive Deception Against Safety-Removal Attacks on Open-Weight Models

The paper introduces ‘Fool’s Gold’, a defensive deception technique for open‑weight language models that hardens them against safety‑removal attacks. By training decoy responses within a differentiable simulation of the attack, the method poisons the payoff of stripped refusal mechanisms, producing confident but falsified answers to hazardous requests while preserving benign behavior. Experiments on seven models (9B‑122B) show that 51‑90% of attacked‑state responses become decoys, with the defense accounting for 27‑84% of this effect, and that the defended 122B model remains within benign‑behavior budgets.

By Mark Russinovich
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Calibrating Criterion Revision in LLM Agents: Failure Modes and a Trace-Anchored Protocol

The paper introduces a framework for evaluating how large language model agents revise their success criteria after failures, defining five non‑compensatory conditions that must be met for a criterion revision to be considered valid. Using the CMB‑0.1 protocol, the authors test twelve cross‑domain scenarios across four system configurations, finding that no model trial satisfies all five conditions and highlighting specific failure modes such as zero‑state reconstruction and inadequate intervention sensitivity. They propose a more stringent trace‑anchored CMB‑0.4 protocol to better isolate and measure criterion revision in future studies.

By Guodong Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

No Usable Linear "Capitulation Direction" in Two Small LLMs: A Validation Protocol for Activation-Steering Claims, and a Cross-Family Behavioral Study of Sycophancy Under Pushback

The study examines how two small instruction‑tuned language models, Qwen2.5‑1.5B and Llama‑3.2‑1B, respond to user pushback on TriviaQA. When initially correct, the models flip to a wrong answer in about 42–43% of cases, with the effectiveness of different pushback styles varying by model. Attempts to decode capitulation from the pre‑response residual stream fail under a rigorous validation protocol, revealing overfitting and a measurement hazard that underestimates capitulation by 18–24 percentage points.

By Saad Aamir, Muhammad Awais Bin Adil
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Dead text or binding clause? Measuring and restoring constraint influence in black-box LLM dialogues

arXiv:2608. 12599v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-turn dialogues let users revoke constraints as easily as impose them, but revocation does not reliably take effect: models keep enacting withdrawn requirements (occasionally beneath comments asserting their removal), a failure we call \emph{behavioral relapse}, or revocation inertia.

By Haoyuan Zhu
arXiv AI
Jul 15

A Threshold Exceedance Framework for CBRN Uplift Evaluation in Frontier Language Models

arXiv:2607. 12200v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As frontier language models advance, policymakers and model developers need methods for assessing whether model access materially increases a non-expert actor's ability to plan high-consequence Chemical, Biological, Radiological, or Nuclear (CBRN) misuse relative to public tools alone.

By Rahul Gupta, Abhinav Mohanty, Payal Motwani, Venkatesh Saligrama, Satyapriya Krishna, Connor Harris, Gary Anthony Ackerman, Brandon Behlendorf, Tom Hobson, Theodore Wilson, Spyros Matsoukas