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
Jul 30

On-Policy Distillation for LLM Safety: A Routing Approach to Template-Robust Realignment

arXiv:2607. 27081v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Fine-tuning is the dominant paradigm for specializing large language models (LLMs), yet it exposes a critical vulnerability: malicious data providers can embed harmful behaviors into downstream corpora, creating models that retain professional skills while violating human values on demand.

By Yongjian Guo, Wanlun Ma, Lingyu Shen, Xi Xiao, Sheng Wen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

DP-MGTD: Privacy-Preserving Machine-Generated Text Detection via Adaptive Differentially Private Entity Sanitization

arXiv:2601. 04641v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The deployment of Machine-Generated Text (MGT) detection systems necessitates processing sensitive user data, creating a fundamental conflict between authorship verification and privacy preservation.

By Lionel Z. Wang, Yusheng Zhao, Jiabin Luo, Xinfeng Li, Lixu Wang, Yinan Peng, Haoyang Li, XiaoFeng Wang, Wei Dong
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Cost-Sensitive Conformal Prediction and Human-in-the-Loop Abstention for Imbalanced High-Stakes Decision Support: A Multi-Domain Benchmark

arXiv:2607. 27143v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: High-stakes decision systems in credit scoring, fraud detection, healthcare, and industrial safety require reliable uncertainty quantification under severe class imbalance and asymmetric error costs.

By Manpreet Singh, Akshatha Srikantha, Shyamal Lakhanpal
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

The Advantage of Fine-Grained Training

arXiv:2509. 05130v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In classification problems, models are trained to predict a class label based on the input data features.

By Davide Pirovano, Federico Milanesio, Michele Caselle, Piero Fariselli, Matteo Osella
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
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

GPT-Red: Automated Red Teaming via Self-Play at Scale

arXiv:2607. 26115v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce \textbf{GPT-Red}, an automated red-teaming agent that is trained to discover novel prompt injection attacks against frontier LLMs.

By Eric Wallace, Christopher A. Choquette-Choo, Nikhil Kandpal, Sam Toyer, Dylan Hunn, Stephanie Lin, Yuxin Wen, Xiangyu Qi, Christopher Wolff, Zizhao Wang, Milad Nasr, Sicheng Zhu, Chuan Guo, Juan Felipe Cer\'on Uribe, Kaiwen Wang, Aiden Low, Kai Xiao, Kai Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

RAGuard: A Layered Defense Framework for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems Against Data Poisoning

arXiv:2607. 26339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems ground large language models (LLMs) in external corpora, but this reliance exposes them to corpus poisoning: maliciously injected passages that manipulate retrieved evidence.

By Pushkal Kumar, Tucker Nielson, Tanish Kolhe, Shubham Zala, Vincent Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Forecasting Trajectory-Level Safety Risks in Black-Box Multi-Turn Interactions

arXiv:2607. 26820v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) evolve from standalone assistants into autonomous agents, ensuring their safety requires shifting beyond pointwise risk assessment to understand how risks emerge and unfold over long-horizon trajectories.

By Shi Lin, Peng Qian, Dinghao Liu, Renjie Sun, Sifan Wu, Dezhang Kong, Chenpei Wang, Xun Wang