arXiv AI

Do Safety Monitors Stay Reliable After an Update? Benchmarking and Predicting Activation-Monitor Staleness

arXiv:2606. 15980v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Activation monitors-lightweight probes trained on a language model's internal representations-are an increasingly common layer in deployment safety stacks.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 13

HyperSafe: Inference-Time Safety Recovery for Fine-Tuned Language Models

Safety alignment in large language models can be fragile under fine-tuning, as even benign task adaptation may increase harmful compliance. Existing defenses mainly follow two directions: they either intervene during or after fine-tuning through retraining or weight modification, which can be costly and may hurt task performance, or they use model-agnostic safety classifiers, which may miss failures specific to a given fine-tuned checkpoint.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Stale Does Not Mean Unsafe: Guard Precision for Tool-Using LLM Agents under Infrastructure State Races

The paper investigates how tool‑using language‑model agents can safely commit changes to infrastructure when external state may change between read and commit. By distinguishing invalidating races from predicate‑preserving and irrelevant ones, the authors evaluate three commit‑time guard granularities—global epoch, read‑set version, and semantic commit predicate—using a deterministic simulator and three quantized model families. The study finds that only the complete predicate guard consistently eliminates unsafe commits, while freshness‑based guards block a large proportion of benign races and model‑side signals fail to replace precise semantic enforcement.

By Zihao Zheng, Jiayu Long, Baichuan Li, Junyi Yao
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Safety Monitors Mostly Catch What the Model Already Refuses

The paper evaluates safety monitors by measuring recall only on prompts that the target model actually answers, rather than on all harmful prompts. Across several guard systems, recall at a 1% false‑positive rate drops sharply when focusing on answered prompts, with monitors catching refused requests 1.1–6.4 times more often than answered ones. Rewriting prompts to be less explicit dramatically increases compliance and reveals that many harmful requests slip past monitors, especially when phrasing is softened. Fine‑tuning guards on these rewritten prompts improves recall from 0.24 to 0.89 on answered requests and generalizes to unseen benchmarks.

By Sripad Karne
arXiv AI
Jul 17

Democratizing Agent Deployment Safety: A Structural Monitoring Approach

arXiv:2607. 14570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI software development agents are increasingly capable of modifying infrastructure and security critical systems, creating risks where an agent completes its assigned task while covertly weakening safeguards through actions such as broadening permissions, degrading logging, or introducing persistence mechanisms.

By Preeti Ravindra, Rahul Tiwari, Vincent Wolowski