AI safety and alignment

Alignment, interpretability, red-teaming, bias and privacy: the research on what these systems do when they misbehave.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Personalized RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models with Human Aligned Personalization

arXiv:2604. 07343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a critical frontier in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reward models (RMs) serving as a central mechanism for capturing diverse human values.

By Qiyao Ma, Dechen Gao, Rui Cai, Boqi Zhao, Hanchu Zhou, Junshan Zhang, Zhe Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Continual Learning with Vision-Language Models via Semantic-Geometry Preservation

arXiv:2603. 12055v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) is prone to catastrophic forgetting, yet current approaches adapt to new tasks without explicitly preserving the cross-modal semantic geometry inherited from pretraining and previous stages, allowing new-task supervision to induce geometric distortion.

By Chiyuan He, Zihuan Qiu, Fanman Meng, Runtong Zhang, Linfeng Xu, Qingbo Wu, Hongliang Li
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

Inducing language models to assert their own consciousness restores human beliefs and values

Aligning large language models to prevent them attributing consciousness to themselves inadvertently alters their representations of mindedness in other entities alongside human beliefs and values. We demonstrate that safety fine-tuning suppresses models' tendencies to attribute minds not only to themselves, but also to non-human animals and natural objects, while also driving a reduction in spiritual belief.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

LEDGERMIND: Provenance-Constrained Multimodal Agentic Reasoning with a Structured Evidence Ledger

Multimodal agents for visual question answering increasingly operate as multi-step trajectories that interleave perception, retrieval, and reasoning, yet evaluation still largely reduces to final-answer accuracy. This aggregate signal cannot tell whether a correct answer was reached through grounded evidence, language priors, or accidental error cancellation.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

Scaling Vision-Language Models Is Not Enough to Mitigate Bias

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are now foundational to multimodal systems, yet their robustness to spurious correlations remains poorly understood at scale. We present the first large-scale empirical study of 194 publicly available VLMs, including 16 model families, covering a wide range of model sizes, 24 training datasets, and three evaluation benchmarks, namely ImageNet (overall performance), CelebA (typical single-attribute bias), and UrbanCars (complex multi-attribute biases).

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

Fidelity Is Not Safety: Gently-Compressed LLMs Pass Every Data-Free Quality Guard Yet Invent Procedure Steps in Agentic Execution

Practitioners accept a compressed language model once it clears a stack of data-cheap quality guards: perplexity within a small factor of the original, downstream accuracy (for example MMLU) inside a confidence interval, and data-free output-fidelity signals that compare the compressed and original network's internal representations under random probe inputs. This stack has a blind spot.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

Contrastive Reinforced Policy Optimization via Privileged Self-Distillation

Recent advances in post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) or On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD). While OPSD provides dense, logit-level supervision, it inherently suffers from exposure bias due to the privileged information of the self-teacher.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

FiRE: Enhancing MLLMs with Fine-Grained Context Learning for Complex Image Retrieval

Due to their strong generalizable multimodal processing and reasoning capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential as universal image retrievers, effectively addressing diverse real-world image retrieval tasks. Nevertheless, pioneering studies, while promising, overlook the potential of fine-grained context modeling and disentangled fine-tuning objectives in enhancing MLLMs' retrieval performance, particularly for complex tasks such as long-text-to-image retrieval, visual dialog retrieval, and composed image retrieval (CIR).

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

Class-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Counterfactual Explanation Generation

Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) enhance the interpretability of black-box models by generating alternative instances with adjusted feature values that achieve a contrastive outcome. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for CFE generation, enabling efficient exploration of counterfactual instances while ensuring control over key metrics like validity, sparsity, and proximity.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

One Patch Is Enough: Reinforcement-Optimized Visual Token Grounding for MLLM-Based Scene Text Spotting

Scene text spotting requires high-precision alignment between textual recognition and spatial localization. While visual-token grounding has emerged as a promising formulation for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the previous multi-patch paradigm often introduces redundant noise and localization ambiguity, particularly for dense or small text instances.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

ZAPs: A Reward Attribution Framework for DeFi Ecosystems with Adversarial-Robust Scoring via Parallel Anomaly Ensemble Detection

Incentive programs are central to user acquisition in decentralized finance, but many reward systems rely on raw volume, transaction count, and wallet count, making them vulnerable to bots and sybil operations. We present ZAPs, a reward attribution framework that combines economic contribution scoring with adversarial robustness.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

HealthSLM-Bench: Benchmarking Small Language Models for Mobile and Wearable Healthcare Monitoring

arXiv:2509. 07260v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Mobile and wearable healthcare monitoring play a vital role in facilitating timely interventions, managing chronic health conditions, and ultimately improving individuals' quality of life.

By Xin Wang, Ting Dang, Xinyu Zhang, Vassilis Kostakos, Michael J. Witbrock, Hong Jia