arXiv Computation and Language

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

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 AI
Aug 24

Can LLMs Introspect? A Reality Check

The paper questions whether large language models (LLMs) truly introspect by critiquing recent studies that claim they can detect and report their internal states. It proposes two necessary conditions for genuine introspection: privileged access to internal representations and second‑order computation that distinguishes from first‑order task performance. Re‑examining two existing paradigms, the authors find that apparent introspective abilities can be explained by input‑based classifiers or generic anomaly detection, concluding that current evidence does not support metacognitive monitoring in LLMs.

By Shashwat Singh, Tal Linzen, Shauli Ravfogel
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.