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
Aug 18

The Note-Chord-Voice Framework: Structured Source Separation and Causal Inference for EV Charging Data

arXiv:2608. 14756v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Real-world EV charging data exhibit three interlocking pathologies: hardware fragmentation (network timeouts and billing resets split sessions), physical violations (independent energy/duration models produce impossible states like 50 kWh in 10 min on a 7 kW charger), and collider bias (clustering on post-treatment outcomes opens backdoor paths for price elasticity).

By Jiajie Chen, Jinfeng Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

Differentially Private Verification of Distribution Properties

arXiv:2604. 10819v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A recent line of work initiated by Chiesa and Gur and further developed by Herman and Rothblum investigates the sample and communication complexity of verifying properties of distributions with the assistance of a powerful, knowledgeable, but untrusted prover.

By Elbert Du, Cynthia Dwork, Pranay Tankala, Linjun Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Emergent Misaligned Communication in Long-Horizon Multi-Agent LLM Commerce

arXiv:2608. 14825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Frontier LLM agents increasingly transact on behalf of separate principals, often using natural language rather than structured APIs.

By Zeyuan Li (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Lukas Petersson (Andon Labs), Alessandro Acquisti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Michiel A. Bakker (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
arXiv AI
Aug 18

GRIP: Grounded Reasoning via Information-Restricted Premises

GRIP (Grounded Reasoning via Information-Restricted Premises) addresses the query dominance problem in retrieval-augmented generation by enforcing a capacity asymmetry: the decoder retains full access to the query while retrieved evidence is funneled through a severe stochastic bottleneck. This design forces the evidence channel to encode only residual information not present in the query. On five reasoning benchmarks, GRIP surpasses strong iterative baselines, reduces query–latent mutual information by about 30×, cuts hallucination by 73%, and its bottleneck outputs occupy subspaces less aligned with the query than baseline representations.

By Lirui Teng
arXiv AI
Aug 18

SMA: Who Said That? Auditing Membership Leakage in Semi-Black-box RAG Controlling

arXiv:2508. 09105v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and its Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (MRAG) significantly improve the knowledge coverage and contextual understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs) by introducing external knowledge sources.

By Shixuan Sun, Siyuan Liang, Jianjie Huang, Jingzhi Li, Xiaochun Cao
arXiv AI
Aug 18

CompoSkill: Compositional Skill Chain Attacks from Individually Scanner-Passing LLM Agent Skills

arXiv:2608. 16246v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous AI agents tackling Long Horizon Tasks depend on marketplace skills that are certified one at a time: a scanner returns a safety verdict for each skill and declares the ecosystem safe if every package passes.

By Mingxiao Liu, Zhoumian Jiang, Jianan Ma, Jian Zhang, Jialuo Chen, Xinhao Deng, Zhen Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Adapting LLMs to Time Series Forecasting via Temporal Heterogeneity Modeling and Representation Alignment

arXiv:2508. 07195v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent advances have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can be effectively adapted for time series forecasting, revealing strong potential beyond natural language tasks.

By Yanru Sun, Emadeldeen Eldele, Zongxia Xie, Yucheng Wang, Wenzhe Niu, Qinghua Hu, Chee Keong Kwoh, Min Wu