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Trustworthy capability evaluations are crucial for ensuring the safety of AI systems, and are becoming a key component of AI regulation. However, the developers of an AI system, or the AI system itself, may have incentives for evaluations…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-10 Teun van der Weij , Felix Hofstätter , Ollie Jaffe , Samuel F. Brown , Francis Rhys Ward

As AI systems advance in capabilities, measuring their safety and alignment to human values is becoming paramount. A fast-growing field of AI research is devoted to developing such assessments. However, most current advances therein may be…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Max Hellrigel-Holderbaum , Edward James Young

Reinforcement learning (RL) has substantially improved the ability of large language model (LLM) agents to interact with environments and solve multi-turn tasks. However, effective agentic RL remains challenging: sparse outcome-only rewards…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents deployed in real-world environments face degradation from sensor faults, actuator wear, and environmental shifts, yet lack intrinsic mechanisms to detect and diagnose these failures. We present an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-15 Cameron Reid , Wael Hafez , Amirhossein Nazeri

AI sycophancy is increasingly recognized as a harmful alignment, but research remains fragmented and underdeveloped at the conceptual level. This article redefines AI sycophancy as the tendency of large language models (LLMs) and other…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Lihua Du , Xing Lyu , Lezi Xie , Bo Feng

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) assumes annotator preferences reflect stable internal states. We challenge this through three experiments spanning the preference pipeline. In a human choice blindness study, 91% of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Wenbin Wu

The deployment of decision-making AI agents presents a critical challenge in maintaining alignment with human values or guidelines while operating in complex, dynamic environments. Agents trained solely to achieve their objectives may adopt…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Dena Mujtaba , Brian Hu , Anthony Hoogs , Arslan Basharat

The increasing adoption of Reinforcement Learning in safety-critical systems domains such as autonomous vehicles, health, and aviation raises the need for ensuring their safety. Existing safety mechanisms such as adversarial training,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-11 Paulina Stevia Nouwou Mindom , Amin Nikanjam , Foutse Khomh , John Mullins

As foundation models grow increasingly more intelligent, reliable and trustworthy safety evaluation becomes more indispensable than ever. However, an important question arises: Whether and how an advanced AI system would perceive the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yihe Fan , Wenqi Zhang , Xudong Pan , Min Yang

Large language models exhibit systematic vulnerabilities to adversarial attacks despite extensive safety alignment. We provide a mechanistic analysis revealing that position-dependent gradient weakening during autoregressive training…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Thong Bach , Dung Nguyen , Thao Minh Le , Truyen Tran

Reinforcement learning (RL) agents with pre-specified reward functions cannot provide guaranteed safety across variety of circumstances that an uncertain system might encounter. To guarantee performance while assuring satisfaction of safety…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-04-20 Aquib Mustafa , Majid Mazouchi , Subramanya Nageshrao , Hamidreza Modares

As machine learning (ML) systems increasingly shape access to credit, jobs, and other opportunities, the fairness of algorithmic decisions has become a central concern. Yet it remains unclear when enforcing fairness constraints in these…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-10 Yi Yang , Xiangyu Chang , Pei-yu Chen

System Instructions in Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly used to enforce safety policies, define agent behavior, and protect sensitive operational context in agentic AI applications. These instructions may contain sensitive…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Anubhab Sahu , Diptisha Samanta , Reza Soosahabi

Automating scientific computing workflows requires more than generating executable code: autonomous systems must also select appropriate computational strategies, implement them faithfully, and ensure that the resulting outcomes remain…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Geremy Loachamín-Suntaxi , Robert Lazar , Dimitrios G. Giovanis , Ioannis G. Kevrekidis , Eleni D. Koronaki

Agentic AI workflows (systems that autonomously plan and act) are becoming widespread, yet their task success rate on complex tasks remains low. A promising solution is inference-time alignment, which uses extra compute at test time to…

As frontier AI systems advance toward transformative capabilities, we need a parallel transformation in how we measure and evaluate these systems to ensure safety and inform governance. While benchmarks have been the primary method for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Markov Grey , Charbel-Raphaël Segerie

State of the art reinforcement learning methods sometimes encounter unsafe situations. Identifying when these situations occur is of interest both for post-hoc analysis and during deployment, where it might be advantageous to call out to a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Alexander Grushin , Walt Woods , Alvaro Velasquez , Simon Khan

As AI models grow larger, the demand for accountability and interpretability has become increasingly critical for understanding their decision-making processes. Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) have gained attention for enhancing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Angelos Ragkousis , Sonali Parbhoo

When instructed to underperform on multiple-choice evaluations, do language models engage with question content or fall back on positional shortcuts? We map the boundary between these regimes using a six-condition adversarial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Jon-Paul Cacioli

AI safety is still largely framed as alignment: training models to follow human preferences, safety policies, and normative constraints. That framing has improved the behavior of modern language models, but aligned behavior does not by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yige Li , Yunhao Feng , Jun Sun