arXiv AI

Beyond Black-Box Obfuscation: Mechanistic Analysis and Defense of White-Box Monitors

arXiv:2505. 14300v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: White-box monitoring is increasingly adopted as an auditing tool as Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed in daily operations to ensure safe model behavior.

arXiv AI
Jun 9

When Behavioral Safety Evaluation Fails: A Representation-Level Perspective

arXiv:2606. 08044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) safety has often been evaluated at the behavior level, which provides limited evidence of internal robustness, as these evaluations target outputs rather than representation-level vulnerability under intervention.

By Enyi Jiang, Anders Gj{\o}lbye, Yibo Jacky Zhang, Sanmi Koyejo
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
arXiv AI
Jul 29

Early Detection of Distributed Backdoors in Multi-Agent LLM Systems: A Characterization Study

arXiv:2607. 24893v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems can be attacked by a payload that no single agent ever holds in full: a poisoned tool hides encrypted fragments in its observations, spreads them across several agents, and an external step reassembles and executes them after the run.

By Diego Fernandez Arias, Dev Prashant Mistry, Ren Wang, Yibo Hu
arXiv AI
Jul 17

Democratizing Agent Deployment Safety: A Structural Monitoring Approach

arXiv:2607. 14570v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI software development agents are increasingly capable of modifying infrastructure and security critical systems, creating risks where an agent completes its assigned task while covertly weakening safeguards through actions such as broadening permissions, degrading logging, or introducing persistence mechanisms.

By Preeti Ravindra, Rahul Tiwari, Vincent Wolowski