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
Jul 31

SciFigAlign: Scoring Scientific Figures by Fine-tuned Alignment of Visuals with Manuscript Evidence

arXiv:2607. 27066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scientific figure assessment in peer review differs fundamentally from general image quality evaluation: a figure must be visually legible, faithfully support the manuscript's claims, and communicate evidence with a clear visual hierarchy.

By Chuanzhi Xu, Zihan Deng, Huiqi Liang, Chengkun Yue, Zhanlin Cui, Pengfei Ye, Weidong Cai
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Ask don't tell: Reducing sycophancy in large language models

arXiv:2602. 23971v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts.

By Magda Dubois, Cozmin Ududec, Christopher Summerfield, Lennart Luettgau
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Procedural Fairness in Multi-Agent Bandits

arXiv:2601. 10600v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In the context of multi-agent multi-armed bandits (MA-MAB), fairness is often reduced to outcomes: maximizing welfare, reducing inequality, or balancing utilities.

By Joshua Caiata, Carter Blair, Kate Larson
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Zero-Fi: Zero-Shot Wi-Fi-Based Human Activity Recognition via Contrastive Signal-Language Alignment

arXiv:2607. 26381v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Wi-Fi-based human activity recognition has advanced substantially, but most existing methods assume a closed set of activities and require labeled Wi-Fi samples for every target class, limiting their ability to recognize unseen activities.

By Yitong Shen, Cheng Guo, Peiliang Wang, Jingzhe Zhang, Yi Sheng, Haopeng Zhang, Hongfei Xue, Yili Ren
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Dynamically Scaled Activation Steering

arXiv:2512. 03661v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Activation steering has emerged as a powerful method for guiding the behavior of generative models towards desired outcomes such as toxicity mitigation.

By Alex Ferrando, Xavier Suau, Jordi Gonz\`alez, Pau Rodriguez
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Beyond Binary Rewards: A Comparative Study of Reward Design for Reinforcement Unlearning

arXiv:2607. 27968v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning seeks to selectively remove specific knowledge from trained language models without full retraining, a growing necessity under privacy regulations such as GDPR and the EU AI Act.

By Efstratios Zaradoukas, Davide Gabrielli, Bardh Prenkaj, Gjergji Kasneci