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
Aug 6

Privileged, but Biased: How PI-Conditioned Teachers Break Self-Distillation

arXiv:2608. 04794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) has emerged as a compute-efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: a self-teacher, conditioned on privileged information (PI) about the answer such as a reference solution, supplies dense per-token supervision to a student that never sees it.

By Sarthak Harne, Chinmay Karkar, Yash Pandya, Ahmed Awadallah, Akshay Nambi
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Temporal Context Awareness: A Defense Framework Against Multi-turn Manipulation Attacks on Large Language Models

arXiv:2503. 15560v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to sophisticated multi-turn manipulation attacks, where adversaries strategically build context through seemingly benign conversational turns to circumvent safety measures and elicit harmful or unauthorized responses.

By Prashant Kulkarni, Assaf Namer
arXiv AI
Aug 6

GeoReward: Mitigating Contextual Variable Overestimation in Vision-Language Models for Cross-Market Preference Prediction

arXiv:2608. 04504v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Vision-language models excel in many multimodal tasks but remain prone to a subtle yet impactful failure mode: they tend to overestimate dominant visual-textual cues while underestimating sparse but decision-critical contextual variables.

By Shuo Liu, Huixiang Cai, Weiru Zhang, Xiaoyi Zeng
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Breadcrumbing Search Agents

arXiv:2608. 04565v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-based search agents are widely used for information-seeking tasks, but their reliance on external tool returns introduces a critical security risk: web content retrieved during execution is untrusted, exposing agents to prompt injection and goal hijacking.

By Xuebin Li, Hanqing Zhao, Siyuan Liang, Kejiang Chen, Weiming Zhang, Dacheng Tao, Nenghai Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Easy to Complete, Hard to Choose: Investigating LLM Performance on the ProverbIT Benchmark

arXiv:2608. 04670v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed computational linguistics and achieved remarkable performance across numerous natural language processing tasks, yet significant gaps persist in understanding how these systems process culturally embedded linguistic expressions.

By Enrico Mensa, Lorenzo Zane, Calogero Jerik Scozzaro, Matteo Delsanto, Tommaso Milani, Daniele Paolo Radicioni
arXiv AI
Aug 6

Teaching MLLMs to Say No: Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension via Refusal Calibrated GRPO

arXiv:2608. 04698v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We tackle the challenging yet underexplored task of Generalized Referring Expression Comprehension (GREC), which requires a model to localize the object described by a textual expression when it exists (positive sample) and to refuse output when it does not (negative sample).

By Xuzheng Yang, Jun Ling, Tao Huang, Caiyan Qin, Peng Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 6

VQ-VAD: Vector-quantized Motion Representation Learning for Human-centric Video Anomaly Detection

arXiv:2608. 05069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) is inherently challenging due to the scarcity of anomalies and the large visual variability in surveillance footage, including changes in lighting, viewpoint, and human appearance.

By Narges Rashvand, Ghazal Alinezhad Noghre, Shanle Yao, Gabriel Maldonado, Hamed Tabkhi
arXiv AI
Aug 6

The Hamilton-Jacobi Theory of Deep Learning

arXiv:2605. 28983v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In this paper, training a neural network is identified, exactly, as a search through Hamilton--Jacobi initial-value problems: each gradient step selects the initial data of a viscous Hamilton--Jacobi equation whose Hopf--Cole propagator best fits the observations; at inference, the input is the spatial point at which that solution is evaluated and the initial condition is already encoded in the weights.

By Jose Marie Antonio Mi\~noza, Erika Fille T. Legara, Christopher P. Monterola
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 6

Multi-Objective Ranking for Live-Streaming: Balancing Fresh and Delayed Signals with Segment-Aware Targeting

arXiv:2608. 04455v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: One of the most challenging problems entertainment live-streaming services face in recommendation systems is that user behaviors are sparse and delayed, and interaction data exhibits bias for different user segments.

By Xiaoyi Gu, Julia Tavares, Eder Santana, Carlos Mendoza-Cardenas, Nikita Mishra, Saad Ali