arXiv:2606. 00566v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As language models take on agentic roles that span calling external APIs, reading tool outputs, and acting on instructions embedded in third-party content, their attack surface expands well beyond what users type.
By Mohammed Sameer Syed (University of Arizona), Rozhin Yasaei (University of Arizona)
The paper identifies a vulnerability in large language models where harmful intent can be hidden within benign narratives, a phenomenon termed Semantic Camouflage. By examining latent activation patterns across several small language model families, the authors discover an "Intent Horizon"—a layer depth where harmful intent representations collapse. They propose Latent Intent Verification (LIV), a lightweight probing defense that detects harmful intent in early layers and outperforms existing guardrails on the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset.
By Md. Hasib Ur Rahman
The paper introduces a counterfactually anchored evidence attribution approach for multi‑turn large language model safety failures. It presents a new dataset of 1,762 conversations, including adversarial, benign twins, and high‑risk vocabulary variants, and trains a lightweight hierarchical model that accurately predicts safety violations and attributes them to specific user turns and token spans. The model achieves high detection performance (F1 = 0.988) and significantly reduces adversarial confidence when top‑attributed tokens are removed, while maintaining low false‑positive rates on benign conversations.
By Srinivasan Subramanian, Kazi Aminul Islam, Md. Abdullah Al Hafiz Khan
arXiv:2607. 01208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models deployed in high-stakes roles can potentially favor certain entities, brands, or viewpoints, steering user decisions at scale.
By Shayan Talaei, Abhinav Chinta, Devvrit Khatri, Amin Karbasi, Azalia Mirhoseini, Amin Saberi
arXiv:2608. 19857v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: For AI agents to be useful beyond simple chat, they must hold sensitive user context such as calendars, credentials, health records, and financial data.
By Jaiden Fairoze, Neal Mangaokar, Kamalika Chaudhuri, Sanjam Garg, Saeed Mahloujifar
arXiv:2606. 05958v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Activation steering has become a popular way to control Large Language Model (LLM) behavior without fine-tuning.
By Abzal Aidakhmetov, Donato Crisostomi, Tommaso Mencattini, Adrian Robert Minut, Iacopo Masi, Emanuele Rodol\`a
The paper introduces a method for identifying the dominant knowledge source behind large language model (LLM) outputs, distinguishing between faithfulness violations (misuse of provided context) and factuality violations (errors in internal knowledge). A simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably classify this source, and the authors present AttriWiki, a self‑supervised pipeline that generates labeled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities or read them from context. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve high Macro‑F1 scores across several models and datasets, generalize zero‑shot to a benchmark, and show that attribution mismatches can increase error rates by up to 70%.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowing the source of an LLM’s answer is crucial for effective mitigation of hallucinations, as attribution mismatches significantly raise error rates."
By Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer
arXiv:2506. 14003v5 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Machine unlearning (MU) for large language models (LLMs), commonly referred to as LLM unlearning, seeks to remove specific undesirable data or knowledge from a trained model, while maintaining its performance on standard tasks.
By Yiwei Chen, Soumyadeep Pal, Yimeng Zhang, Qing Qu, Sijia Liu
arXiv:2607. 23804v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Context attribution methods for large language models (LLMs) identify which input context contributes to the model response.
By Quoc-Huy Trinh, Lin Zhu, Sebastian Szyller
arXiv:2510. 22014v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Discrete optimization-based jailbreaking attacks on large language models aim to generate short, nonsensical suffixes that, when appended onto input prompts, elicit disallowed content.
By Sarah Ball, Niki Hasrati, Alexander Robey, Avi Schwarzschild, Frauke Kreuter, Zico Kolter, Andrej Risteski
The paper introduces LeakGauge, a method that appends a suffix to a model’s input to gauge the risk of context leakage before decoding. By mapping prefill token probabilities to an attack‑risk score, LeakGauge achieves high AUROC (0.944–0.996) across 11 large language models, including GLM‑5.2 and Kimi‑K3, and remains robust to language changes and different attack styles. The approach also demonstrates sensitivity to internal leakage directions and can be implemented with fewer than 0.5K additional parameters and minimal latency.
By Maosen Zhang, Jianshuo Dong, Boting Lu, Wenyue Li, Xiaoping Zhang, Tianwei Zhang, Jie Zhang, Han Qiu
arXiv:2606. 04928v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed across diverse applications, raising critical questions for governance, accountability, and data provenance.
By Fr\'ed\'eric Berdoz, Luca A. Lanzend\"orfer, Kaan Bayraktar, Roger Wattenhofer