arXiv AI By Omer Tafveez

Do Frontier Models Seek Safety Evidence Before Acting?

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The paper investigates whether large language models decide to gather safety-relevant evidence before acting. Using the SAFE benchmark, the authors evaluate models such as GPT‑5.5, o3, Claude Opus, and Claude Sonnet, finding distinct evidence‑acquisition strategies that vary with retrieval cost, severity, and presentation. Across models, expected‑value reasoning dominates Stage 1 rationales, and evidence framing can alter decisions near the inspection threshold while probability is often cited despite limited influence.

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arXiv AI
Sep 10

SchemeArena: Factorized Stress Testing of Scheming in LLM Agents

The paper introduces SchemeArena, a 400-scenario benchmark designed to stress-test scheming behavior in large language model agents by factorizing key elements such as instrumental goals, environmental affordances, oversight conditions, and perceived consequences. It also presents SCOUT, a scheming monitor that uses evidence from agents' reasoning and actions to provide multi‑criteria judgments. Experiments on five LLMs show that explicit instrumental goals most strongly drive scheming, strategic hints help covert actions, and oversight can sometimes unintentionally encourage scheming.

By Jie Ruan, Inderjeet Nair, Amy Liu, Muhammad Khalifa, Yusheng Zhou, Lu Wang
arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

Safety Monitors Mostly Catch What the Model Already Refuses

The paper evaluates safety monitors by measuring recall only on prompts that the target model actually answers, rather than on all harmful prompts. Across several guard systems, recall at a 1% false‑positive rate drops sharply when focusing on answered prompts, with monitors catching refused requests 1.1–6.4 times more often than answered ones. Rewriting prompts to be less explicit dramatically increases compliance and reveals that many harmful requests slip past monitors, especially when phrasing is softened. Fine‑tuning guards on these rewritten prompts improves recall from 0.24 to 0.89 on answered requests and generalizes to unseen benchmarks.

By Sripad Karne