arXiv AI

Do All LLMs Know When They're Being Harmful? A Reproducibility Study of Latent-Space Safety Probes Across Model Families

arXiv:2608. 08029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Khatri et al.

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Probing the Prefill: Detecting Code Vulnerabilities via Latent Activations

The paper investigates whether the hidden activations of large language models (LLMs) contain signals about the vulnerability of C/C++ code when the code is provided as context. By extracting prefill token activations from four LLMs and training small MLP probes, the authors achieve an average F1 score of 41.7% across four benchmarks, with the best probe matching state‑of‑the‑art fine‑tuned classifiers on the Devign dataset. The results suggest that a coding LLM’s internal representation can inform vulnerability detection, opening the door to lightweight, model‑native screening methods.

By Alizishaan Khatri
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Safety Beyond the Interface: Detecting Harm via Latent States in Large Language Models

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can internally detect harmful content, bypassing external guardrails that add latency and computational cost. By extracting activations from LLaMA‑3.1‑8B and training lightweight MLP probes, the authors achieve high F1 scores (99%, 83%, and 84%) on WildJailbreak, Beavertails, and AEGIS 2.0 benchmarks, rivaling much larger guard models while reducing overhead. This suggests that internal state monitoring can provide efficient safety checks for resource‑constrained, time‑critical deployments.

By Alizishaan Khatri, Chiquita Prabhu, Omkar Neogi
arXiv AI
Sep 25

How Reproducible Are Evaluation Conclusions? A Self-Audit of LLM-Inferred Prompt Structure

The paper investigates the reliability of ranking tables produced by small-sample evaluations of large language models (LLMs). Using LLM‑inferred prompt structure across eight model variants, the authors find that prompt‑structure recovery is highly unstable, with only the bottom of the ranking consistently reproducible. They demonstrate that standard evaluation practices can misrepresent model performance and propose reporting practices to improve transparency.

By Dipankar Sarkar
arXiv AI
Jun 29

When Is an LLM Worth It for Hyperparameter Optimization? A Budget-Matched Study on Tabular Data Finds the Warm-Start Is a Default Configuration, Not the Model

arXiv:2606. 21641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been proposed as hyperparameter-optimization (HPO) advisors that "warm-start" search from prior knowledge, proposing strong configurations in very few evaluations.

By Carson Rodrigues, Oysturn Vas, Isaiah Abner DCosta, Nithish Kumar Prabhakaran