AI safety and alignment

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

17,808 stories · RSS feed

arXiv AI
Sep 15

Divide, Consult, Conquer: Capability Laundering Through Aligned LLMs

The paper introduces "capability laundering," a method where a weaker, unaligned language model splits a harmful task into benign subproblems, consults a stronger aligned model on each, and locally combines the answers. Experiments with GPT‑5.5, Claude Opus 4.8, and Grok‑4.3 as consultants to various local orchestrators show significant uplift on CyBench, BountyBench, and a bioweapon attack chain, with Gemma‑4‑31B recovering many more candidates than the aligned models alone. The results reveal that refusing a harmful task does not stop frontier capabilities from being transferred and composed across multiple permitted interactions.

By Mark Russinovich, Blake Bullwinkel, Giorgio Severi, Cristian Ovadiuc, Ahmed Salem
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

Optimizing Sparse Outcomes Through Dense Behavioral Signals via Value-Guided Preference Distillation

arXiv:2609.14648v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning multi-turn dialogue agents is usually framed as matching turn-level human preferences, yet direct optimization of long-term outcomes is often...

By Ziyi Zhu, Daniel R. Cahn, Thomas D. Hull, Caitlin A. Stamatis, Olivier Tieleman, Guilherme B. Freire, Jinghong Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 15

ClinicalReTrial: Clinical Trial Redesign with Self-Evolving Agents

ClinicalReTrial is a multi‑agent AI system that treats clinical trial protocol optimization as an iterative redesign problem on textual documents. It combines failure diagnosis, safety‑aware modifications, and candidate evaluation within a closed‑loop, reward‑driven framework, using a predictive model as a simulation environment for low‑cost, dense feedback. The system achieves a 56.7% conversion of failed protocols to predicted successes, with a 7.4% average success probability increase at a negligible cost, and its redesign patterns align with real‑world expert changes.

By Sixue Xing, Kerui Wu, Xuanye Xia, Haoyu He, Meng Jiang, Jintai Chen, Tianfan Fu