arXiv Machine Learning

ServeGuard: Verifiable, Bounded-Residual Confinement of Operator-Invisible Channels Without Revealing the Certified Read Factor

ServeGuard is a supply‑chain primitive that allows a publisher to ship a proof‑carrying adapter for an open‑weight language model, proving in zero‑knowledge that the adapter contains no hidden backdoor channel in the monitor’s blind subspace. The proof is inexpensive because it relies on a deterministic function of the public base model, and the served residual is the model’s own public floor. The system lets consumers or regulators verify the absence of this class of hidden channels without revealing the certified read factor or trusting the publisher.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

A False Average: Pooled CoT-Monitor Accuracy Conceals a Reasoning-Dependent Fragility

The paper demonstrates that aggregate accuracy figures for chain‑of‑thought (CoT) monitors can be misleading because a large portion of detected hacks rely solely on action patterns rather than reasoning. By rewriting only the agent’s reasoning to appear truthful while keeping actions identical, the authors show that the monitor’s performance on the reasoning‑dependent subset collapses dramatically, yet the overall pooled accuracy drops only modestly. The study reveals that CoT monitors are fragile when reasoning is the key signal and that accuracy should be reported separately for this subset.

By Shikhar Shiromani, Leo Richter
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 7

Locating and Steering Refusal Beyond Attention

The paper investigates where the ‘refusal’ behavior of language models resides across different architectures. It finds that a single direction in the residual stream governs refusal in transformers, and that the same direction—after a rigid rotation—also governs refusal in state‑space models (SSMs). By aligning these directions and applying a detector‑triggered gate, the authors demonstrate that refusal can be effectively transferred across transformer, SSM, recurrent, and hybrid architectures, showing that safety tooling can be ported by re‑estimating the direction at each architecture’s write site rather than rebuilding it from scratch.

By Preethi Carmel Bosco, Gopalakrishnan Srinivasan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 8

The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agents

A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below the no-skill baseline, but its guarantee assumes an unbiased reward, which is false for the LLM judges that reference-free tasks force upon us.