arXiv Machine Learning

Behavioral Inference at Scale: The Fundamental Asymmetry Between Motivations and Belief Systems

arXiv:2509. 05624v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: How much information about an agent's underlying values can be recovered from its observable behavior?

arXiv AI
Jun 30

SEVA: Self-Evolving Verification Agent with Process Reward for Fact Attribution

arXiv:2606. 29713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit.

By Aojie Yuan, Yi Nian, Haiyue Zhang, Zijian Su, Yue Zhao
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Confident at the moment of action: belief miscalibration in LLM play under hidden information

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) correctly gauge their confidence when acting in a hidden‑information chess variant. In experiments where the location of a hidden royal piece is repeatedly relocated, the models’ stated probabilities about the piece’s position were almost never accurate at high confidence levels, with a calibration deficit concentrated in those high‑confidence events. Across multiple model configurations and providers, the same pattern emerged, and conventional evaluation metrics such as legality, cost, latency, and completion rate were found to be uncorrelated with belief quality, yet a model could still win the game despite poor confidence estimates.

By Bhushan Kashinath Joshi
arXiv AI
Sep 2

HugAgent: A Human Simulation Benchmark for Individual-Level Reasoning

arXiv:2510.15144v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Simulating human reasoning in open-ended tasks has long been a central aspiration in AI and cognitive science. While large language models now appr...

By Chance Jiajie Li, Zhenze Mo, Yuhan Tang, Ao Qu, Jiayi Wu, Kaiya Ivy Zhao, Yulu Gan, Jie Fan, Jiangbo Yu, Hang Jiang, Paul Pu Liang, Jinhua Zhao, Luis Alberto Alonso Pastor, Kent Larson
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Moral Sensitivity in LLMs: A Tiered Evaluation of Contextual Bias via Behavioral Profiling and Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that require nuanced ethical reasoning, yet existing bias evaluations treat model outputs as simply "biased" or "unbiased.

By Yash Aggarwal, Atmika Gorti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Manas Gaur
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 AI
3d ago

Unlearning Deceptive Behaviors in LLMs with Contrastive Forget Sets

The paper introduces PACT, a method for unlearning deceptive behaviors in large language models by using contrastive forget sets that compare a model’s responses under deceptive and neutral contexts. PACT trains the model to produce pressure‑aware counterfactual targets, preserving benign system‑prompt adherence and reasoning traces while dramatically reducing deception rates from over 50% to under 3% on 32B reasoning models.

By Haoran Tang, Rajiv Khanna