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 7

Clinician input steers AI toward accurate and harmful recommendations

arXiv:2603. 14158v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are entering clinical workflows, yet evaluations rarely assess how clinician reasoning shapes model behavior during clinical interactions.

By Ivan Lopez, Selin S. Everett, Bryan J. Bunning, April S. Liang, Dong Han Yao, Shivam C. Vedak, Kameron C. Black, Sophie Ostmeier, Stephen P. Ma, Emily Alsentzer, Jonathan H. Chen, Akshay S. Chaudhari, Eric Horvitz
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Reducing Hallucination in Vision-Language Models via Stage-wise Preference Optimization under Distribution Shift

arXiv:2605. 16411v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Hallucination remains a fundamental challenge in vision-language models (VLMs), where autoregressive generation may produce linguistically plausible yet physically inconsistent or visually ungrounded responses due to likelihood maximization under joint probabilistic modeling.

By Qinwu Xu
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

Handling Missing Data in Probabilistic Regression Trees

arXiv:2608. 06195v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probabilistic Regression Trees (PRTrees) are a smooth and consistent alternative to classical regression trees, producing continuous predictions through probabilistic split assignments.

By Taiane Schaedler Prass, Alisson Silva Neimaier, Guilherme Pumi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

A Six-Dimensional Taxonomy of Post-Training Adaptation Techniques with Applications in AI Governance

arXiv:2608. 06246v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Post-training adaptation has become central to modern machine learning practice and includes techniques such as retraining, fine-tuning, parameter-efficient adaptation, alignment, retrieval augmentation, model editing, unlearning, calibration, and Multimodal Instruction Tuning.

By Fardin Afdideh, Fernando Seoane, Farhad Abtahi
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 7

Safe Evolution with Circuit Anchors

arXiv:2608. 05158v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In biological evolution, unconstrained mutation can lead to catastrophic outcomes: organisms may evolve enhanced capabilities while losing essential functions for survival.

By Yan Liu, Jie Fu, Tsung-Yi Ho
arXiv AI
Aug 7

OSReward: Instituting Standardized Evaluation for Cross-Platform Computer-Use Reward Models

arXiv:2607. 28609v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Computer-using agents (CUAs) are advancing rapidly across the digital world.

By Qiushi Sun, Kanzhi Cheng, Yian Wang, Bowen Yang, Hang Yan, Liheng Chen, Fangzhi Xu, Zichen Ding, Nuo Chen, Jialin Cao, Xingdong Gong, Zehao Li, Kaiming Jin, Xinfeng Yuan, Zhoumianze Liu, Jingyang Gong, Zhangyue Yin, Jiahui Gao, Zhiyong Wu, Tianbao Xie, Jianbing Zhang, Ben Kao, Lingpeng Kong
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Position: It's Time to Optimize LLMs for Self-Consistency

arXiv:2608. 05188v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite ever-increasing sophistication in language model (LM) pre- and post-training pipelines, many important failures persist: models overcondition on user framing ("sycophancy"), exhibit incomplete logical generalization, and produce confident but incorrect responses.

By Itamar Pres, Belinda Z. Li, Laura Ruis, Zifan Carl Guo, Keya Hu, Mehul Damani, Isha Puri, Ekdeep Singh Lubana, Jacob Andreas
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Innocent Panels, Hateful Stories: Evaluating and Detecting Hateful Intent in Multi-Turn Visual Story Generation

arXiv:2608. 05210v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Picture books and comics have long been used to disseminate hateful narratives because they are easily understood even by children, as exemplified by the notorious Nazi propaganda picture book \emph{Der Giftpilz}.

By Ye Leng, Junjie Chu, Yiting Qu, Mingjie Li, Yun Shen, Yang Zhang
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Improving the Realism of Synthetic Clinical Benchmarks Under Utility Constraints

arXiv:2608. 06265v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Synthetic clinical benchmarks for enterprise AI agents can pass existing utility checks and still remain structurally unrealistic, especially in privacy-sensitive healthcare settings where operational data are hard to access.

By Omid Bazgir, Md Nasir, Jacob Hoffman, Yang Yang, Manu Agrawal, Anusua Trivedi, Vinay Rao Dandin, Chris Gibbons, Christine Swisher
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Hijacking Robots with a Piece of Paper: A Systematic Study of Physical Prompt Injection in VLM-Controlled Robots

arXiv:2608. 05715v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed as planners in robotic systems, where they translate natural-language commands into executable actions grounded in visual scene understanding.

By S. M . Bhagya P. Samarakoon, M. A. Viraj J. Muthugala, W. K. R. Sachinthana, Mohan Rajesh Elara
arXiv AI
Aug 7

Does Latent Context Help? A Controlled Evaluation of Inverse Reinforcement Learning in Arctic Shipping

arXiv:2608. 06105v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial Intelligence (AI)-assisted navigation can help Arctic shipping adapt to rapidly changing sea-ice conditions, but reliable deployment requires reward models that are interpretable and robust to changing environments.

By Vaishnav Vaidheeswaran, Dilith Jayakody, Biruk Ambaw, Jaswanth Kumar, Md Mahbub Alam, Gabriel Spadon