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
Jul 30

Scaling Vision-Language Models Is Not Enough to Mitigate Bias

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) such as CLIP are now foundational to multimodal systems, yet their robustness to spurious correlations remains poorly understood at scale. We present the first large-scale empirical study of 194 publicly available VLMs, including 16 model families, covering a wide range of model sizes, 24 training datasets, and three evaluation benchmarks, namely ImageNet (overall performance), CelebA (typical single-attribute bias), and UrbanCars (complex multi-attribute biases).

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

Fidelity Is Not Safety: Gently-Compressed LLMs Pass Every Data-Free Quality Guard Yet Invent Procedure Steps in Agentic Execution

Practitioners accept a compressed language model once it clears a stack of data-cheap quality guards: perplexity within a small factor of the original, downstream accuracy (for example MMLU) inside a confidence interval, and data-free output-fidelity signals that compare the compressed and original network's internal representations under random probe inputs. This stack has a blind spot.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

Contrastive Reinforced Policy Optimization via Privileged Self-Distillation

Recent advances in post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) or On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD). While OPSD provides dense, logit-level supervision, it inherently suffers from exposure bias due to the privileged information of the self-teacher.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

FiRE: Enhancing MLLMs with Fine-Grained Context Learning for Complex Image Retrieval

Due to their strong generalizable multimodal processing and reasoning capabilities, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated significant potential as universal image retrievers, effectively addressing diverse real-world image retrieval tasks. Nevertheless, pioneering studies, while promising, overlook the potential of fine-grained context modeling and disentangled fine-tuning objectives in enhancing MLLMs' retrieval performance, particularly for complex tasks such as long-text-to-image retrieval, visual dialog retrieval, and composed image retrieval (CIR).

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

Class-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Counterfactual Explanation Generation

Counterfactual explanations (CFEs) enhance the interpretability of black-box models by generating alternative instances with adjusted feature values that achieve a contrastive outcome. Reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising approach for CFE generation, enabling efficient exploration of counterfactual instances while ensuring control over key metrics like validity, sparsity, and proximity.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

One Patch Is Enough: Reinforcement-Optimized Visual Token Grounding for MLLM-Based Scene Text Spotting

Scene text spotting requires high-precision alignment between textual recognition and spatial localization. While visual-token grounding has emerged as a promising formulation for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the previous multi-patch paradigm often introduces redundant noise and localization ambiguity, particularly for dense or small text instances.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 30

ZAPs: A Reward Attribution Framework for DeFi Ecosystems with Adversarial-Robust Scoring via Parallel Anomaly Ensemble Detection

Incentive programs are central to user acquisition in decentralized finance, but many reward systems rely on raw volume, transaction count, and wallet count, making them vulnerable to bots and sybil operations. We present ZAPs, a reward attribution framework that combines economic contribution scoring with adversarial robustness.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Conformal Changepoint Localization and Root Cause Analysis with Corrupted Observations

arXiv:2607. 26481v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Detecting when the statistical behavior of an engineered system changes, and identifying which component is responsible, are core problems in the monitoring of telecommunication networks, robotic platforms, security infrastructure, and multi-agent systems.

By Seunghun Yu, Meiyi Zhu, Petar Popovski, Joonhyuk Kang, Osvaldo Simeone
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Recover, Decode, Reguard: Guard-Agnostic Defense Amplification againstEncoded VLM Jailbreaks

arXiv:2607. 26574v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Safety classifiers ("guards") are the dominant black-box defense for vision-language models, yet they judge an input's surface form, not its meaning: a harmful request re-encoded as set theory, formal logic, a rare language, code, or an image of text slips past a guard that would block it in plain language -- the decode gap.

By Haoyu Zhang, Zhuoxi Wang, Shibo Zheng, Zijian Xiao, Xiangchen Guan, Mohammad Zandsalimy, Shanu Sushmita
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Scores Are Not Decisions: Cost-Aware Stopping for Tool Acquisition in LLM Agents

arXiv:2607. 27083v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As LLM agents increasingly depend on diverse external services such as search engines, databases, and connectors, agent harnesses face a fundamental tool-selection challenge: acquiring too few tools leaves the task under-informed, while too many adds cost, context load, and privacy exposure.

By Yicheng Feng, Yan Zhang, Yan Cheng, Wei Qi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Parameterized Fair Resource Allocation under Diversity Constraints

arXiv:2607. 26485v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Resource allocation across multiple agent groups arises in many applications including e-commerce recommendation systems, housing assignment, and course allocation, and is commonly formulated as an optimization problem with diversity constraints to ensure group fairness.

By Keke Huang, Yik Yu Ng, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Xiaokui Xiao