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 AI
Oct 1

Automatic estimation of verbal fluency index in people with Motor Neuron Disease using ASR alignment and pause modelling

The study introduces an automated system for estimating the Verbal Fluency Index (VFI) in individuals with Motor Neuron Disease (MND) by combining ASR (WhisperX) and VAD (Silero) with precise timestamping. Using a unique MND dataset, the approach outperformed traditional acoustic and self‑supervised embedding methods, achieving high predictive accuracy (R² up to 0.9 for P‑words and 0.8 for S‑words). Clinically inspired features were consistently superior, demonstrating the feasibility of automated VFI estimation for monitoring cognitive impairment in MND.

By Bahman Mirheidari, Leslie Ing, Daniel Blackburn, Sharon Abrahams, Christopher McDermott, Heidi Christensen
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

Evaluating Language Model Safety Across Long Adversarial Conversations

The paper investigates how conversational safety in language models degrades over extended, adversarial interactions. By testing three instruction‑tuned models with persistent adversarial users across up to 101 turns, the study finds that safe‑response rates drop sharply from 85–100% at the first turn to 15–44% by the end. This demonstrates that strong single‑turn safety does not guarantee continued safety in long conversations.

By Parisa Salmani, Peter R. Lewis
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

Diagnosing On-Policy Self-Distillation for Reasoning Language Models

The paper investigates on‑policy self‑distillation (OPSD) as a method to enhance reasoning in language models, focusing on mathematical reasoning across models from 0.6B to 8B parameters. Through controlled experiments and token‑level analysis, the authors find that OPSD’s effectiveness depends on alignment between the teacher’s reasoning mode and the full teacher prefix, rather than on privileged semantics alone. They observe that OPSD only improves reasoning in limited compatibility regimes, while often causing length growth, degradation, or behavioral collapse, and that the teacher’s signal is unstable and not predictive of downstream performance.

By Yang Li, Gongle Xue, Yuheng Yuan, Yijia Guo, Shizhe Zhang, Liwen Hu, Lei Ma
arXiv AI
Oct 1

Whose Voice Survives the Summary? A Voice-Retention Audit of LLM Employee Listening

The paper introduces a Voice Retention / Representation Ratio metric to assess bias in large language model (LLM) summaries of employee feedback. Using a bilingual corpus of 2,586 responses from a global professional services firm, the study finds that criticism is reported more reliably than praise, and that LLM summaries tend to filter by popularity rather than sentiment—criticism often survives while single-mention concerns, short or German-only content are frequently omitted. The authors argue that prevalence, not sentiment, drives the bias, and provide a metric, field evidence, and a disaggregated voice‑retention card for future audits.

By Thilo Tamme, Anton Hantel, Bijan Khosrawi-Rad
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 1

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