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
Aug 26

Rules Before Oracles: Auditable, User-Configurable Argument Selection for Deliberative Polling

The paper proposes a transparent, user‑configurable rule for selecting arguments in deliberative polls, replacing opaque learned rankers. It formalises argument selection over bipolar justification sets, introduces seven civic recommender criteria, and presents a one‑hop reversed endorsement flow rule that meets them. Experiments on 17,000 simulated runs show the rule performs comparably to random on coverage but outperforms other methods on endorsement mass and robustness under adversarial pressure.

By Muntaser Syed, Markus Zanker, Marius Silaghi
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Generative AI for Validating Physics Laws

arXiv:2503.17894v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose generative learner for estimating heterogeneous treatment effects and characterizing the full distribution of causal effects. The...

By Maria Nareklishvili, Nicholas Polson, Vadim Sokolov
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Names Can Hurt: Spotting Slopsquatting Risks Caused by Package Name Hallucinations in Local Coding LLMs

The paper introduces a two‑layer detector to prevent ‘slopsquatting’—the risk of local coding LLMs fabricating Python package names that adversaries can pre‑register on PyPI. The first layer checks PyPI for existence, while the second uses a Random Forest classifier on ten name‑and‑metadata features; an import reconciler resolves naming mismatches. Embedded in a LangGraph state machine, the system retries at escalating temperatures and falls back to stronger models, achieving hallucination‑free code in 76% of 300 curated prompts and recovering additional runs through intra‑ and cross‑model retries.

By Akash Raj, Sargam Sahu
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Quasar: A Programming Language Specialized for LLM Code Actions

Quasar is a new programming language designed to improve large language model (LLM) code actions by separating internal program logic from external tool calls. It allows developers to annotate external calls with effect information and modify internal execution to track these effects, enabling easier implementation of new features. The authors demonstrate Quasar’s utility by adding access control, autoparallelization, and conformal prediction for uncertainty quantification.

By Stephen Mell, Botong Zhang, David Mell, Shuo Li, Ramya Ramalingam, Nathan Yu, Stephan Zdancewic, Osbert Bastani
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 26

Variance-Guided Spatial Attention Fusion for Robust End-to-End Driving under Asymmetric Sensor Degradation

The paper introduces Variance‑Guided Spatial Attention Fusion (VG‑SAF), a method for robust end‑to‑end driving that fuses camera and LiDAR data while handling asymmetric sensor degradation. VG‑SAF uses a physically grounded augmentor to generate dense reliability masks, modality‑specific experts to predict per‑pixel reliability scales, and a hybrid attention mechanism that gates unreliable cells and balances modalities. The approach also includes a Laplace uncertainty head to signal severe or combined sensor failures, and demonstrates improved closed‑loop robustness on the CARLA Longest6 benchmark across various degradation scenarios.

By Weizhi Tao, Zengwang Jin, Xiao Wang, Hailong Huang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

When May an Agent Stop? Evidence-Carrying Termination for Tool-Using LLMs

The paper introduces Evidence-Carrying Termination (ECT), a method that allows tool‑using large language model agents to declare a task complete only when a typed certificate links every required answer claim to valid, in‑scope trace evidence and a deterministic replay confirms the claimed value. In controlled experiments across 48 synthetic tasks and 576 trajectories, ECT eliminated unsafe completions and premature unsupported terminations, outperforming existing termination critics and controllers while maintaining comparable supported completion rates.

By Jason Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 26

'Ghaib in Translation' aka Unseen Harm: Measuring Cross-Script Safety Inconsistency with 'Missed-in-Urdu' Scores in LLM Hate Speech Detection

The paper "Ghaib in Translation" investigates how large language models (LLMs) handle Urdu, a widely spoken language that is largely absent from safety evaluations. Five prominent LLMs—GPT‑4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Qwen‑2.5, and Llama‑3.1—were tested on six datasets covering Nastaliq Urdu, Roman Urdu, English, and code‑switched Urdu‑English. The study found significant label instability between original‑script and English‑translation classifications, with missed‑in‑Urdu rates ranging from 2.4% to 9.9% (median 4.3%). A review of 205 papers across nine ALW/WOAH editions revealed no dedicated Urdu research, underscoring the language’s neglect in current safety research.

By Fawzia Zehra (Fuzzy), Kara-Isitt, Sonal Khosla, Stephen Swift
arXiv AI
Aug 26

FARCA: Fact-Aligned Reliability-Aware Credit Assignment for Reinforcement Learning with Factual Supervision

FARCA is a policy‑optimization framework that addresses the problem of noisy factual credit assignment in reinforcement learning for large language models. It transforms coarse factual supervision into token‑level training signals that are both localized and weighted by a reliability estimate derived from counterfactual evidence attribution. Experiments on several factual reasoning benchmarks show that FARCA improves model factuality while maintaining general reasoning abilities.

By Qiming Xie, Wenjie Zheng, Xiangqing Shen, Rui Xia