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