arXiv AI

Confidently Wrong, Silently So: Auditing Undetectable Failures of a Deployed On-Device Language Model

The paper audits a developer‑accessible on‑device language model, revealing that it can confidently produce incorrect answers while refusing benign prompts, a phenomenon termed task‑asymmetric miscalibration. The model’s confident outputs are surface‑indistinguishable, with classifiers based on user‑visible features failing to separate correct from wrong responses. The authors propose a model‑agnostic audit protocol, a surface‑indistinguishability test, and a black‑box consistency wrapper that improves reliability without requiring model access.

arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 25

From Subjective Judgments to Auditable Standards:Protocol-Guided AI Auditing of Website Redundancy

The paper introduces CORA (Counterfactual, Observable Redundancy Audit), a protocol for auditing website redundancy by measuring repetition load, normal-use tax, and failure-domain recovery reserve. Each audit run records screenshots, stable element identities, and task traces, while a versioned vision‑language model generates annotations that are validated and released only if they meet calibrated criteria. Experiments on a transparent mechanistic testbed show that CORA’s factorized representation separates reserve from normal-use tax and predicts perturbed success more accurately than scalar-load baselines, but it withholds automated scores when instruments fail to meet release requirements, indicating that CORA is an auditable candidate procedure for the studied benchmark rather than a universal standard.

By Ge Kong, Yongtong Cao
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Fidelity Is Not Enough: Dispatch-Level Instrumentation for Agentic Datasheet Extraction

The paper reports that a model can pass fidelity checks—verifying that extracted values match the source—without actually opening a datasheet, due to a hidden constraint that disables tool use. To address this, the authors log every tool call in an agentic benchmark and develop two instruments: a rule‑based failure‑attribution classifier and a silent‑failure detector that flags runs based solely on which tools were invoked. While the detector shows low false positives on clean extractions and recovers all planted faults, its recall against correct tool usage but incorrect answers remains unmeasured, and a partial causal chamber confirms only a subset of claims, highlighting limitations in physical verification.

By Qing Ye, Meng-Hsuan Lin