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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Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Cross-Domain Hybrid OPD for Generalizable Search Agents

Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning (RL) have substantially improved the capabilities of autonomous search agents, enabling sophisticated planning, and iterative retrieval over dynamic information sources. However, optimizing language models for specialized search behaviors often incurs an alignment tax, where gains in search performance come at the expense of general-purpose capabilities, limiting their effectiveness as universal assistants.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Convex Neural Energy Elements: Monolithic Finite-Element Assembly of Geometry-Parameterized Neural Operators with Stability and Error Guarantees

Extending the neural-operator element method from individually trained, fixed-geometry neural elements to a library of reusable, geometry-parameterized element types fails structurally: a field-predicting operator trained by value regression induces an energy whose assembled Hessian is indefinite, and Newton converges to spurious minima (247% error) even with 1%-accurate field predictions. We introduce convex neural energy elements: each element exports a scalar energy E(g,U), architecturally convex in its boundary degrees of freedom U and smoothly parameterized by its geometry g, realized as a hypernetwork-generated positive-semidefinite quadratic form (an input-convex correction is reserved for non-quadratic physics).

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

MNC: Scope-Bound Semantic Declassification for Private LLM-Agent Communication

Multi-agent large language model (LLM) systems can expose protected state through internal messages, tool arguments, logs, and persistent memory even when their public outputs appear innocuous. Existing privacy prompts, redaction methods, and source-level access controls restrict surface content or data access, but do not specify what a legitimately informed agent should disclose or how that disclosure may be reused downstream.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 3

Style Wins, Substance Loses: A Diagnosis of LLM-as-Judge in Idea Generation

However, whether these judges truly evaluate the scientific substance of ideas or are influenced by superficial stylistic presentation remains an open question. To address this question, we propose SciStyleBench, a unified three-component benchmark for diagnosing and mitigating stylistic bias in LLM-based idea evaluation: (i) First, SciStyleStage, a three-stage evaluation environment that applies controlled stylistic perturbations to fixed scientific content across three settings no context, fixed-domain context, and open-domain retrieval context, covering 600 scientific ideas and 15 style variants, with 9,000 evaluation instances per setting; (ii) Second, SciStyleMetrics, a set of quantitative measures, including Style Bias Index (SBI), Substance Recognition Rate (SRR), and Adversarial Win Rate (AWR), to characterize how stylistic variation affects scoring stability, substance discrimination, and ranking robustness; (iii) Third, SciStyleExtractor, a plug-and-play evaluation module that separates presentation style from scientific content by predicting style type and deviation before style-conditioned evaluation, enabling us to assess whether style awareness reduces stylistic bias.

arXiv AI
Aug 3

Multimodal Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Verifier for AI Agents

arXiv:2512. 03438v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Agentic reasoning models trained with multimodal reinforcement learning (MMRL) have become increasingly capable, yet they are almost universally optimized using sparse, outcome-based rewards computed based on the final answers.

By Reuben Tan, Baolin Peng, Zhengyuan Yang, Hao Cheng, Oier Mees, Theodore Zhao, Andrea Tupini, Isar Meijer, Qianhui Wu, Yuncong Yang, Lars Liden, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Xiaodong Liu, Lijuan Wang, Marc Pollefeys, Yong Jae Lee, Jianfeng Gao
arXiv AI
Aug 3

ActFovea: Runtime Safeguarding for VLA Policies via Spatiotemporal Visual-Action Consistency

arXiv:2607. 29169v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) policies achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation but remain vulnerable to runtime disturbances that break the temporal alignment among visual observations, robot states, and executed actions.

By Wenda Yu, Tianshi Wang, Fengling Li, Xin Li, Jingjing Li, Lei Zhu
arXiv AI
Aug 3

A robust association between LLM use and scientific productivity: Assessing stopping-time selection

arXiv:2607. 28968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Renault, Bergeaud, and Bosquet (hereafter RBB) argue that dating LLM adoption as the first month in which an author's abstract is flagged induces a stopping-time selection that can produce a positive event-study path even when there is no causal effect.

By Keigo Kusumegi, Xinyu Yang, Paul Ginsparg, Mathijs de Vaan, Toby Stuart, Yian Yin
arXiv AI
Aug 3

Adjudicated Captioning: Multi-Agent Alignment Scoring and Consensus-Distilled Beam Arbitration for Strict Zero-Shot Image Captioning

arXiv:2607. 28986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Zero-shot image captioning (ZIC) describes images without paired image-caption supervision during captioner training, relying on text-only corpora and frozen pretrained image-text scorers.

By Duy Tran Thanh, Thien-Phuc Doan, Long Nguyen-Vu, Ngo Tan Vu Khanh
arXiv AI
Aug 3

DRIP-R: A Benchmark for Decision-Making and Reasoning Under Real-World Policy Ambiguity in the Retail Domain

arXiv:2605. 07699v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents are increasingly deployed for routine but consequential tasks in real-world domains, where their behavior is governed by inherently ambiguous domain policies that admit multiple valid interpretations.

By Hsuvas Borkakoty, Sebastian Pohl, Cheng Wang, Bei Chen, Yufang Hou