Single Canonical Prompts Underestimate LLM Safety's Surface-Form Sensitivity
arXiv:2608. 02665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A benchmark score is a measurement instrument, yet most benchmarks read each item at a single canonical surface form.
arXiv:2606. 25097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates inference by letting a draft model propose tokens for a target model to verify, raising a concrete safety question: at temperature zero, can draft-side behavior leak into safety-scored outputs?
arXiv:2608. 02665v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A benchmark score is a measurement instrument, yet most benchmarks read each item at a single canonical surface form.
arXiv:2607. 17283v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-stream autoregressive decoding of large language models is bound by memory bandwidth: each generated token requires one full forward pass through the target model, and successive passes cannot be parallelized.
arXiv:2606. 29581v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLM deployments routinely compress models and raise sampling temperature to reduce cost, latency, or repetition, yet safety evaluations usually treat these choices as fixed implementation details.
arXiv:2606. 26185v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-as-judge ("grader") components are now standard in evaluation harnesses, including safety evaluations where a pass/fail verdict may gate downstream deployment decisions.
arXiv:2607. 03333v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents are becoming a common interface for research, coding, and question answering, yet their Thought-Action-Observation loop is often serial: the model reasons, emits a tool call, then idles the GPU until the result returns.
arXiv:2607. 19257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Practitioners make three prompt-design decisions with almost no controlled evidence behind them: how to format instructions and context (markdown, plain text, prose, or tabular), how many simultaneous instructions a system prompt can carry before compliance degrades, and how much context a model can hold before recall and honesty degrade.
arXiv:2608. 12652v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Benchmark contamination is diagnosed today with n-gram overlap, with likelihood-based membership inference, or with canary strings, and each needs something usually unavailable: the training corpus, a well-chosen test statistic, or foresight at dataset release.
Modern LLM deployments routinely compress models and raise sampling temperature to reduce cost, latency, or repetition, yet safety evaluations usually treat these choices as fixed implementation details. This leaves a practical uncertainty: does a model that is safe at FP16 and greedy decoding remain safe after it is quantized and sampled stochastically, or do the two deployment knobs amplify one another?
arXiv:2606. 05183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are increasingly deployed as high-stakes advisors, yet standard alignment benchmarks treat sycophancy as a binary failure mode.
arXiv:2608. 08029v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Khatri et al.
arXiv:2607. 21535v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Speculative decoding accelerates autoregressive generation by having a cheap draft propose tokens that a target verifies in parallel.
arXiv:2606. 20502v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Whether LLMs scoring well on vulnerability benchmarks genuinely reason about security or merely pattern-match on contaminated data remains unresolved.