arXiv AI

Calibrating Interpretability Instruments Before Trusting Their Verdicts

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Fidelity Is Not Enough: Dispatch-Level Instrumentation for Agentic Datasheet Extraction

The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.

By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin
arXiv AI
Sep 7

When Do Internal Probes Beat Reading the Answer? Miscalibrated Readouts and Behavior-Concealed Knowledge in Language Models

A 0.6B language model consistently answers YES to 1,200 logical tests, yet its behavior shows no discrimination. Linear probes reveal the correct verdict with high AUC (0.96) and transfer to unseen structures, but a single scalar readout fails due to a saturated decision threshold offset by +4.6 σ. Adjusting this threshold restores behavior accuracy from 50 % to 81 % and improves higher‑scale models, demonstrating that miscalibrated readouts, not hidden knowledge loss, drive performance gaps.

By Gnaneswar Villuri, Hashmath Shaik, Alex Doboli
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 4

VeriPhy: Agentic Physical Reasoning for World Model Evaluation and Refinement

VeriPhy is an auditable physical‑verification system that transforms a text prompt into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any video frames are generated. During execution, it gates calls to frozen low‑level experts (segmentation, tracking, counting, depth, OCR, audio‑event detection, etc.) and records provenance‑carrying evidence for each action. The system maps these records to a three‑valued state—supported, contradicted, or unknown—providing traceable verdicts that can be used to refine generation models.

By Wenzhuo Xu, Yuchen Zhu, Chongjian Ge, Xuan Shen, Jing Shi, Jason Kuen, Yongxin Chen, Molei Tao, Christopher McComb, Noelia Grande Guti\'errez, Jiuxiang Gu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

The Implications of Linguistic Illegibility for LLM Security

The paper introduces the concept of "linguistic illegibility," describing how a large language model’s (LLM) language outputs and extracted linguistic features may not accurately reflect its internal computations. It argues that because LLMs compute primarily in activation spaces, any reliance on linguistic self‑reporting for security—such as chain‑of‑thought monitoring or constitutional self‑critique—cannot be fully reliable. The authors propose taint tracking and other sandboxing techniques that do not depend on the model’s linguistic state as a more robust security foundation.

By James Mickens
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 2

VeriPhy: Agentic Physical Reasoning for World Model Evaluation and Refinement

VeriPhy is an auditable physical‑verification system that evaluates generated video by compiling prompts into typed physical obligations and a statically validated execution plan before any frames are observed. During execution, it gates calls to frozen low‑level experts (e.g., segmentation, tracking, counting, depth, OCR, audio‑event detection) and returns provenance‑carrying evidence records, which are mapped to a three‑valued state (supported, contradicted, unknown) with full traceability. On a 1,500‑clip corpus of human‑annotated flaw records, VeriPhy accounts for 228 failures out of 304, outperforming a published question‑decomposition evaluator that accounts for 164, while also providing auditable evidence for each verdict.