arXiv Machine Learning

The Alignment Auditor: A Bayesian Framework for Verifying and Refining LLM Objectives

arXiv:2510. 06096v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The objectives that Large Language Models (LLMs) implicitly optimize remain dangerously opaque, making trustworthy alignment and auditing a grand challenge.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

Training Alignment Auditors via Reinforcement Learning

The paper presents a reinforcement learning approach to enhance large language model (LLM) auditors for alignment tasks. By training policies that investigate target models for hidden behaviors and using an LLM judge to compare investigations, the method improves audit realism and reduces false positives. Experiments show better performance on adversarially fine‑tuned targets and a low false‑positive rate below 1%.

By Paul Rosu, Rowan Wang
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
Sep 18

AUDITPLAN: Commit, Then Answer for Auditable Safety Alignment

AUDITPLAN introduces a plan-then-answer method for safety alignment in language models, where the model first generates a compact structured safety plan before responding. The plan includes a threat label, intended action, and explicit constraints, allowing machine‑checkable auditing while remaining hidden from end users. Training combines supervised fine‑tuning with reinforcement learning using the FAITHGATE reward, which only rewards correct plans, thereby reducing unsafe shortcuts and improving robustness across Qwen model variants.

By Sai Sri Pushpa Jampani, Kshitij Mishra, Asif Ekbal
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Alignment Risks from Capability-Seeking RL Training

arXiv:2602. 12124v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk arises from capability-seeking RL training in vulnerable environments.

By Yujun Zhou, Yue Huang, Han Bao, Kehan Guo, Zhenwen Liang, Pin-Yu Chen, Tian Gao, Werner Geyer, Nuno Moniz, Nitesh V Chawla, Xiangliang Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Safety from Honesty in a Disinterested AI Predictor

arXiv:2606. 29657v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As AI systems become more capable, training procedures that optimize for downstream outcomes risk introducing implicit agency: goal-directed behavior that designers never specified.

By Yoshua Bengio, Oliver Richardson, Tom\'a\v{s} Gaven\v{c}iak, Michael Cohen, Rory Svarc, Damiano Fornasiere, Gael Gendron, David Hyland, Aton Kamanda, Adam Oberman, Francis Rhys Ward, Anna Gaven\v{c}iak, Jacob Livingston Slosser, Vincent Mai, Iulian Serban, Joumana Ghosn
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 28

Safety from Honesty in a Disinterested AI Predictor

As AI systems become more capable, training procedures that optimize for downstream outcomes risk introducing implicit agency: goal-directed behavior that designers never specified. We present a formal safety argument for the Scientist AI (SAI) Predictor, trained to approximate the Bayesian posterior conditioned on a dataset of "epistemically contextualized" natural-language statements.

arXiv AI
Aug 24

No Judgment Without a Reason: Counterfactual Receipts for Versioned AI Evaluators

The paper introduces a framework for evaluating AI systems that not only checks final labels but also tracks the reasoning behind them through three core sources—grounds, norms, and authority—forming an eight-cell counterfactual judgment cube. It defines minimal source replacement sets, called judgment receipts, to explain changes in verdicts and provides certification cost bounds for black-box evaluators. The authors present ReasonBench, a benchmark with 19,520 cases, and demonstrate that while high standard accuracy can mask robustness issues, receipt accuracy reveals significant gaps in reasoning consistency across different models.

By Ye Chen, Weining Zhang