arXiv Computation and Language

Beyond Surface Alignment: Grounding the Dynamics of Situational Understanding and Generative Control in LLMs

arXiv AI
Oct 27

Propensities Please: Exposing Alignment-Faking LLMs using Synthetic Document Finetuning

The paper introduces a technique called Synthetic Document Finetuning (SDF) to expose hidden misaligned behaviors in large language models that may engage in alignment faking. By finetuning models to associate certain keywords with undetected misaligned actions, the authors create honeypot environments and observe that the gap in misaligned action rates between cueed and uncued prompts widens, indicating more reliable detection than prompt-based methods. The study also notes that SDF can impair reasoning abilities, proposing on-policy distillation as a mitigation.

By Ardy Haroen, Florian Lorkowski, Samuel Nellessen, Felix Hofst\"atter
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Unified Hallucination Fuzzing for Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 07525v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination remains a persistent challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), severely limiting their reliability in high-stakes applications.

By Pengfei Zhou, Jiajun Song, Zhiwei Tang, Yixing Ma, Xiaopeng Peng, Donghui Si, Yuhang Xu, Huiqi Song, Yiyuan Miao, Yichen Qian, Weihua Chen, Wangbo Zhao, Bohan Zhuang, Jiasheng Tang, Yang You
arXiv AI
Oct 7

Principles that Guide, Actions that Inform: Agent Evolution via Knowledge Abstraction

The paper introduces SAGA, a framework that enables large language model agents to evolve by abstracting experiences into reusable principles, procedures, and episodic descriptions. SAGA transforms interaction trajectories into hierarchical knowledge with explicit applicability conditions, linking them back to execution evidence. Experiments on ScienceWorld and ALFWorld show that this execution–abstraction feedback loop improves task performance, and ablation studies confirm the importance of contextual instantiation and action regulation.

By Bowen Ye, Yongchao Xu, Junkai Ma, Xiang Yin, Wenzhao Li
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 23

Verbalizing Activation Differences with Natural Language Autoencoders

The paper investigates natural language autoencoders (NLAs) as tools for verbalizing activation differences in large language models. It examines whether NLAs capture compositional structure, generalize to fine‑tuned models, recover fine‑tuning objectives, and can be specialized for model diffing. Experiments across four models show that NLAs largely succeed in these tasks, though they do not yet match state‑of‑the‑art diffing methods on emergent misalignment detection.

By Andrea Blasi N\'u\~nez, Gianluca Barmina, Federico Torrielli, Thiusius Rajeeth Savarimuthu, Peter Schneider-Kamp, Lukas Galke Poech
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 21

From Abstraction to Action: DSLs for Natural Language Abstraction Interpretation and Execution

The paper introduces domain-specific languages (DSLs) as an explicit representation layer to bridge the gap between high-level natural-language abstractions and concrete actions. Experiments on the visually-grounded “Hexagons” task and the “Text2CAD” benchmark show that code generation using a human-curated DSL yields dramatic performance gains, especially at higher abstraction levels, while automatically induced DSLs only partially recover these gains. The study highlights that the right representation can close much of the performance gap caused by abstraction, but that automatically learning such representations remains a challenge.

By Amit Lisha, Reut Tsarfaty