Related papers: Subliminal Corruption: Mechanisms, Thresholds, and…
Fine-tuning LLMs on narrow harmful datasets can induce Emergent Misalignment (EM), where models exhibit misaligned behavior far beyond the fine-tuning distribution. We argue that emergent misalignment can be better understood as a…
This paper presents a novel application of explainable AI (XAI) for root-causing performance degradation in machine learning models that learn continuously from user engagement data. In such systems a single feature corruption can cause…
LLMs produce harmful and undesirable behavior when trained on datasets containing even a small fraction of poisoned data. We demonstrate that GPT models remain vulnerable to fine-tuning on poisoned data, even when safeguarded by moderation…
We systematically evaluate the quality of widely used adversarial safety datasets from two perspectives: in isolation and in practice. In isolation, we examine how well these datasets reflect real-world adversarial attacks based on three…
Contrastive steering has been shown as a simple and effective method to adjust the generative behavior of LLMs at inference time. It uses examples of prompt responses with and without a trait to identify a direction in an intermediate…
Even the state-of-the-art deep learning models lack fundamental abilities compared to humans. Multiple comparison paradigms have been proposed to explore the distinctions between humans and deep learning. While most comparisons rely on…
As AI systems become more capable of complex agentic tasks, they also become more capable of pursuing undesirable objectives and causing harm. Previous work has attempted to catch these unsafe instances by interrogating models directly…
Synthetic data has become essential for training foundation models, yet benchmark contamination threatens evaluation integrity. Although existing detection methods identify token-level overlap, they fail to detect semantic-level…
We introduce a set of image transformations that can be used as corruptions to evaluate the robustness of models as well as data augmentation mechanisms for training neural networks. The primary distinction of the proposed transformations…
Data used in deep learning is notoriously problematic. For example, data are usually combined from diverse sources, rarely cleaned and vetted thoroughly, and sometimes corrupted on purpose. Intentional corruption that targets the weak spots…
Millions of users now design personalized LLM-based chatbots that shape their daily interactions, yet they can only roughly anticipate how their design choices will manifest as behaviors in deployment. This opacity is consequential:…
Neural Networks are sensitive to various corruptions that usually occur in real-world applications such as blurs, noises, low-lighting conditions, etc. To estimate the robustness of neural networks to these common corruptions, we generally…
This research explores how human-defined goals influence the behavior of Large Language Models (LLMs) through purpose-conditioned cognition. Using financial prediction tasks, we show that revealing the downstream use (e.g., predicting stock…
The performance of computer vision models are susceptible to unexpected changes in input images caused by sensor errors or extreme imaging environments, known as common corruptions (e.g. noise, blur, illumination changes). These corruptions…
The widespread adoption of generative models such as Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT has made them increasingly attractive targets for malicious exploitation, particularly through data poisoning. Existing poisoning attacks compromising…
Language models pre-trained on web-scale corpora demonstrate impressive capabilities on diverse downstream tasks. However, there is increasing concern whether such capabilities might arise from evaluation datasets being included in the…
Recursive learning -- where models are trained on data generated by previous versions of themselves -- is increasingly common in large language models, autonomous agents, and self-supervised systems. However, standard performance metrics…
Large language models increasingly rely on synthetic data due to human-written content scarcity, yet recursive training on model-generated outputs leads to model collapse, a degenerative process threatening factual reliability. We define…
We identify a novel phenomenon in language models: benign fine-tuning of frontier models can lead to privacy collapse. We find that diverse, subtle patterns in training data can degrade contextual privacy, including optimisation for…
We present a data poisoning attack -- Phantom Transfer -- with the property that, even if you know precisely how the poison was placed into an otherwise benign dataset, you cannot filter it out. We achieve this by modifying subliminal…