arXiv AI

Distill to Detect: Exposing Stealth Biases in LLMs through Cartridge Distillation

arXiv:2607. 01208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models deployed in high-stakes roles can potentially favor certain entities, brands, or viewpoints, steering user decisions at scale.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

Truth Lies Deep: Countering Semantic Camouflage via Latent Intent Verification

The paper identifies a vulnerability in large language models where harmful intent can be hidden within benign narratives, a phenomenon termed Semantic Camouflage. By examining latent activation patterns across several small language model families, the authors discover an "Intent Horizon"—a layer depth where harmful intent representations collapse. They propose Latent Intent Verification (LIV), a lightweight probing defense that detects harmful intent in early layers and outperforms existing guardrails on the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset.

By Md. Hasib Ur Rahman
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

Exemplar Partitioning for Mechanistic Interpretability

The paper introduces Exemplar Partitioning (EP), an unsupervised technique that constructs interpretable feature dictionaries from large language model activations by clustering streamed activations into Voronoi regions defined by exemplars and their averages. EP allows comparison of dictionaries across layers, checkpoints, and architectures, and demonstrates utility in interpreting model behavior, tracking training dynamics, detecting hidden concepts, and enabling targeted interventions. Experiments on Gemma‑2‑2B and Llama‑3.1‑8B show EP can reveal how instruction tuning reorganizes harmful prompt activations, facilitate interventions that alter model responses, and achieve high concept‑detection performance while requiring far fewer construction tokens than comparable methods.

By Jessica Rumbelow
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

One Token Is Enough: Fingerprinting and Verifying Large Language Models from Single-Token Output Distributions

arXiv:2607. 10252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly consumed through opaque serving chains - API aggregators, resellers, and inference providers - in which the client has no technical means to confirm that the model answering is the model advertised, and recent audits show that a substantial fraction of commercial endpoints deviate from the vendor's reference weights.

By Tomas Bruckner
arXiv AI
Sep 11

Reference-Based Bias Detection in LLMs via Relative Representations of Hidden States

The paper introduces a reference‑based bias detection method that audits hidden‑state representations of language models by encoding sentences as similarities to a fixed set of anchor sentences. This relative representation allows comparison across model variants, such as before and after fine‑tuning, and yields a metric called Representational Bias Shift (ΔB). ΔB correlates strongly with output‑level bias changes, can detect bias‑increasing checkpoints with high ROC AUC, and is computationally efficient, requiring only a few minutes and far less compute than traditional benchmarks.

By Marek Jeli\'nski, Jan Dubi\'nski, Maciej Chrabaszcz, Sebastian Cygert
arXiv AI
Jun 17

Combating Data Laundering in LLM Training

arXiv:2604. 01904v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Post-hoc unauthorized-training data detection for large language models (LLMs) typically assumes a query-with-originals regime: rights holders query a target LLM with raw proprietary data and assess whether the model assigns them stronger memorization-based detection signals, e.

By Muxing Li, Zesheng Ye, Sharon Li, Feng Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 3

TextCloak: Thwarting Unauthorized LLM Exploitation via RL-Driven Unlearnable Text

arXiv:2607. 28862v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to significant advances across a wide range of language tasks, while simultaneously raising growing concerns about unauthorized data exploitation and privacy leakage.

By Chengshuai Zhao, Pingchuan Ma, Dawei Li, Bohan Jiang, Zhiyuan Yu, Zhen Tan, Huan Liu