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
Jun 2

SORA: Free Second-Order Attacks in Fast Adversarial Training

arXiv:2606. 00738v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial Training (AT) is a leading defense against adversarial examples but often suffers from Catastrophic Overfitting (CO) in efficient single-step variants, where robustness to multi-step attacks collapses despite high single-step performance.

By Mazdak Teymourian, Ramtin Moslemi, Farzan Rahmani, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Brain-Atlas-Guided Generative Counterfactual Attention for Explainable Cognitive Decline Diagnosis Using Multimodal Connectomes

arXiv:2606. 01237v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and subjective cognitive decline (SCD) are closely associated with the early Alzheimer's disease continuum, where accurate and explainable diagnosis is important for early risk assessment and intervention.

By Xiongri Shen, Jiaqi Wang, Zhenxi Song, Yi Zhong, Leilei Zhao, Xin He, Baiying Lei, Zhiguo Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 2

The Paradox of Outcome Optimization: A Causal Information-Theoretic Bound on Reasoning Shortcuts in LLMs

arXiv:2606. 00674v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) aligned via outcome-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) frequently exhibit a critical failure mode: they achieve high performance on in-distribution benchmarks while demonstrating brittle reasoning capabilities on out-of-distribution (OOD) tasks.

By Zihan Chen, Yiming Zhang, Wenxiang Geng, Zenghui Ding, Yining Sun
arXiv AI
Jun 2

CSRP: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Chinese Text Correction via Reinforcement Learning with Efficiency-Aware Rewards

arXiv:2606. 00020v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) based Chinese Grammatical Error Correction (CGEC) systems face two critical challenges: general-purpose models lack specialized linguistic priors for subtle grammatical distinctions, and Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Maximum Likelihood Estimation fails to optimize for precision-focused metrics, leading to systematic over-correction.

By Wei Tian, Yuhao Zhou, Man Lan
arXiv AI
Jun 2

eMoT: evolving Memory-of-Thought via Symbolic Anchoring and Memory Corrosion

arXiv:2606. 02054v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance on multi-step reasoning tasks, their reliability is persistently hindered by critical limitations such as unconstrained hallucinations and poor numerical computation.

By Xiang Li, Jiwei Wei, Ke Liu, Yitong Qin, Jinyu Guo, Malu Zhang, Peng Wang, Yang Yang
arXiv AI
Jun 2

SafeMCP: Proactive Power Regulation for LLM Agent Defense via Environment-Grounded Look-Ahead Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 01991v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As Large Language Model (LLM) agents increasingly leverage the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to operate in complex environments, the expansion of their action spaces offers agents unsafe capabilities and underscores the risk of power-seeking.

By Lichao Wang, Zhaoxing Ren, Tianzhuo Yang, Jiaming Ji, Chi Harold Liu, Yaodong Yang, Juntao Dai
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Measuring Alignment-Induced Activation Shifts Correctly: A Template-Controlled Difference-in-Differences Protocol

arXiv:2605. 24583v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Comparing a model's internal activations before and after alignment is a natural way to ask what safety training changes: one forms the matrix of paired aligned-minus-base activations on safety-relevant inputs and reads off its effective rank or top direction.

By Yuki Nakamura