arXiv AI

Don't Inoculate Everything: Stratified Inoculation Prompting Narrows Backdoor Triggers and Preserves Desired Traits

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

In-Training Defenses against Emergent Misalignment in Language Models

arXiv:2508. 06249v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EM): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target domain.

By David Kacz\'er, Magnus J{\o}rgenv{\aa}g, Clemens Vetter, Esha Afzal, Robin Haselhorst, Lucie Flek, Florian Mai
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Semantic Overlays: Mitigating Prompt Injection with Annotations Beyond Tokens and Steering Vectors

The paper introduces Semantic Overlays, a steering technique that adds non‑textual annotations to a language model’s input by applying learned adapters at specific prefill positions. These overlays create an out‑of‑band channel that encodes span identity and complex semantics, enabling the model to interpret marked text differently—such as rewriting code in a specified language or ignoring executable instructions. Experiments show that Semantic Overlays dramatically reduce prompt‑injection success rates while preserving model utility and readability of marked spans.

By Joshua Penman