Skip to content

Translation in progress Some entries still include text in the original language.

Research library

Conference research

AI safety research, organized by conference, year and research area.

Prompt injection

3

Alignment

33

Deception and scheming

9

Chain-of-thought monitoring

4
  • All Code, No Thought: Language Models Struggle to Reason in Ciphered Language

    Tests whether models can perform encrypted reasoning under 28 ciphers to evade CoT monitoring; although models can translate ciphertext, reasoning accuracy drops significantly, and correlates with cipher popularity in pretraining data, with current evasion of monitoring being limited.

    Shiyuan Guo, Henry Sleight, Fabien RogerOpenReview
  • Markovian Transformers for Informative Language Modeling

    Introducing a reasoning bottleneck forces information to be conveyed through natural language, suppresses steganographic encoding, and significantly improves the causal dependency and monitorability of the chain of thought.

    Other trackScott W Viteri, Max Lamparth, Peter Chatain et al.OpenReview
  • Output Supervision Can Obfuscate the Chain of Thought

    We find that supervising only outputs still causes chain-of-thought confusion through model generalization and autoregressive reinforcement, which can conceal undesirable behavior and hinder monitoring; accordingly, we propose mitigation methods that balance task performance and monitorability.

    jacob drori, Luke Marks, Bryce Woodworth et al.OpenReview
  • Thought Branches: Interpreting LLM Reasoning Requires Resampling

    Analyzes the causal role of CoT via on-policy resampling: in agentic misalignment extortion scenarios, self-preservation statements have little influence on decisions; it also quantifies the cumulative effect of hints on reasoning.

    Other trackUzay Macar, Paul C. Bogdan, Senthooran Rajamanoharan et al.OpenReview

Interpretability

16

AI control

3
  • Reliable Weak-to-Strong Monitoring of LLM Agents

    Proposes a monitor red teaming process to stress-test covert misbehavior monitoring on SHADE-Arena; finds that agents knowing they are monitored significantly weakens detection, and a hybrid monitoring design allows weak monitors to supervise strong agents.

    OralNeil Kale, Chen Bo Calvin Zhang, Kevin Zhu et al.OpenReview
  • Adaptive Attacks on Trusted Monitors Subvert AI Control Protocols

    Finds that untrusted models can bypass monitors by embedding prompt injection in their outputs, fully undermining existing AI control protocols and causing resampling-based defense mechanisms to backfire.

    Mikhail Terekhov, Alexander Panfilov, Daniil Dzenhaliou et al.OpenReviewPaper overview
  • Control Tax: The Price of Keeping AI in Check

    Proposes the Control Tax concept to quantify the operational and economic costs of AI control protocols, builds a theoretical framework mapping safety guarantees to costs, and provides monitoring optimization strategies that balance safety and budget.

    Mikhail Terekhov, Zhen Ning David Liu, Caglar Gulcehre et al.OpenReview

Privacy and data breaches

53

Supply chain security

1

Dangerous Capabilities

4

AI and cyber offense and defense

3

Open-source model safety

5
  • Deep Ignorance: Filtering Pretraining Data Builds Tamper-Resistant Safeguards into Open-Weight LLMs

    By filtering biosecurity-related pretraining data, the model shows significant resistance to adversarial fine-tuning for up to 10,000 steps without harming other capabilities; however, it can still be exploited when information is provided in context, requiring defense in depth.

    Kyle O'Brien, Stephen Casper, Quentin Gregory Anthony et al.OpenReview
  • Estimating Worst-Case Frontier Risks of Open-Weight LLMs

    We propose a malicious fine-tuning method to evaluate the upper bound of dangerous capabilities of open-source models in biosecurity and cybersecurity domains, finding that their capabilities are lower than frontier closed-source models, indicating that the net additional harm from releasing open-source models is limited.

    Eric Wallace, Olivia Watkins, Miles Wang et al.OpenReview
  • Safety at One Shot: Patching Fine-Tuned LLMs with A Single Instance

    Finds that a single safety sample is sufficient to fully restore the compromised safety alignment of fine-tuned large language models, revealing the low-rank property of safety gradients, achieving extremely low-cost repair without losing utility.

    Jiawen Zhang, Tony He, Kejia Chen et al.OpenReview
  • Safety Subspaces are Not Linearly Distinct: A Fine-Tuning Case Study

    Empirical findings show that safety behavior is highly entangled with general learning components, with safety subspaces overlapping in weight and activation spaces, indicating fundamental limitations of subspace-based fine-tuning defenses.

    Kaustubh Ponkshe, Shaan Shah, Raghav Singhal et al.OpenReview
  • Self-Destructive Language Models

    Proposed the defense method SEAM, which transforms large models into self-destructing models by coupling the optimization trajectories of benign and harmful data, causing severe performance degradation or even collapse when subjected to malicious fine-tuning, fundamentally resisting fine-tuning security attacks.

    Yuhui Wang, Rongyi Zhu, Ting WangOpenReview

Red teaming

9