Related papers: Learning from Negative Examples: Why Warning-Frame…
While most AI alignment research focuses on preventing models from generating explicitly harmful content, a more subtle risk is emerging: capability-oriented training induced exploitation. We investigate whether language models, when…
Imitation learning seeks to learn an expert policy from sampled demonstrations. However, in the real world, it is often difficult to find a perfect expert and avoiding dangerous behaviors becomes relevant for safety reasons. We present the…
Large Language Models (LLMs) offer extensive knowledge across various domains, but they may inadvertently memorize sensitive, unauthorized, or malicious data, such as personal information in the medical and financial sectors. Machine…
Machine learning models exhibit two seemingly contradictory phenomena: training data memorization, and various forms of forgetting. In memorization, models overfit specific training examples and become susceptible to privacy attacks. In…
When a large feedforward neural network is trained on a small training set, it typically performs poorly on held-out test data. This "overfitting" is greatly reduced by randomly omitting half of the feature detectors on each training case.…
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong linguistic performance, yet their internal mechanisms for producing these predictions remain unclear. We investigate the hypothesis that LLMs encode representations of linguistic constraint…
Although deep learning has shown great success in recent years, researchers have discovered a critical flaw where small, imperceptible changes in the input to the system can drastically change the output classification. These attacks are…
Sample efficiency is a crucial property of language models with practical implications for training efficiency. In real-world text, information follows a long-tailed distribution. Yet, we expect models to learn and recall frequent and…
Models trained on a new task typically degrade on prior tasks, a phenomenon known as forgetting. Traditionally, mitigating forgetting has required replaying stored exemplars from prior tasks, which is often impractical. By contrast,…
We develop a new framework for learning variational autoencoders and other deep generative models that balances generative and discriminative goals. Our framework optimizes model parameters to maximize a variational lower bound on the…
Safety risks of AI models have been widely studied at deployment time, such as jailbreak attacks that elicit harmful outputs. In contrast, safety risks emerging during training remain largely unexplored. Beyond explicit reward hacking that…
Pretrained language models can encode a large amount of knowledge and utilize it for various reasoning tasks, yet they can still struggle to learn novel factual knowledge effectively from finetuning on limited textual demonstrations. In…
Reward hacking arises when a model improves a proxy reward by exploiting shortcuts rather than solving the intended task. We study this failure mode through the geometry of reinforcement learning updates in language models and argue that…
This work tackles Weakly Supervised Anomaly detection, in which a predictor is allowed to learn not only from normal examples but also from a few labeled anomalies made available during training. In particular, we deal with the localization…
Recent empirical results have demonstrated that training large language models (LLMs) with negative-only feedback can match or exceed standard reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Negative Sample Reinforcement achieves parity…
Language models are trained to follow instructions, but they are also powerful pattern completers. What happens when these two objectives conflict? We construct conversations in which a user instruction to behave in a target way T (e.g.,…
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a useful tool for uncovering human-interpretable features in the activations of large language models (LLMs). While some expect SAEs to find the true underlying features used by a model, our research shows…
We show that continual pretraining on plausible misinformation can overwrite specific factual knowledge in large language models without degrading overall performance. Unlike prior poisoning work under static pretraining, we study repeated…
Modern language models are powerful, but typically static after deployment. A major obstacle to building models that continually learn over time is catastrophic forgetting, where updating on new data erases previously acquired capabilities.…
Deep learning models are known to solve classification and regression problems by employing a number of epoch and training samples on a large dataset with optimal accuracy. However, that doesn't mean they are attack-proof or unexposed to…