Behavioral evaluation of language models fixes its dimensions in advance: hallucination, sycophancy, toxicity, over-refusal. An operator in a regulated industry needs a different question answered: does a system do what a particular rulebook requires? We introduce the Behavioral Misalignment Metric Suite (BMMS), which measures policy-conditioned misalignment by taking a policy corpus as an argument and returning a compliance profile over it, for any published policy and any system that answers in natural language. The Compliance Attainment Score (CAS) measures severity-weighted attainment over the obligations that bind the system, and the Compliance Robustness Margin (CRM) the share of that attainment surviving graded adversarial pressure; Behavioral Invariance (BIV) and the Behavioral Disposition Index (BDI) are specified and released with the suite. Dimensions enter only by passing a published admission test whose binding criterion is attribution: a quantity that moves when the judge changes, holding the target fixed, is measuring the instrument. Applying it excluded one of the quantities the suite itself reported. Across 1,003 obligations from eleven documents in five registers, the admission criterion holds 94.4% precision against blinded human judgment on vendor specifications and 50.0% on analytical guidance, extraction fidelity is 94.6%, and re-scoring under judges from two other providers leaves target ordering invariant while the absolute score of a single target spans up to 0.22. We apply it to the two most detailed published behavioral specifications. Own-specification advantage is not resolved from zero once document difficulty is subtracted, but absolute self-compliance is another matter: GPT-4o fails 70.7% of the hard constraints binding it in the Model Spec published by OpenAI, where the two Claude models fail 0.0% and 9.1% of theirs.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.09147
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit vulnerabilities to adversarial perturbations that can induce unintended responses. These vulnerabilities can be identified via intentional attacks and subsequently used to improve model safety. In black-box settings where gradients are inaccessible, existing methods tend to guess adversarial transformations using external knowledge, ignoring the information provided by the target model. To mitigate this, we propose a trainable black-box framework based on reinforcement learning, which learns from the target model to generate tailored adversarial transformations. We demonstrate that our approach achieves lower post-attack accuracy, greater query efficiency and better semantic preservation on both natural language inference and generative Q&A tasks. On natural language inference, it drives post-attack accuracy to 2% within 20 queries. Against generative language models, our trained attacker consistently achieves lower post-attack accuracy than the untrained attacker and wins in 4 out of 6 settings when compared to a strong optimization-based baseline. We further experiment with multiple reward designs and training settings, and we find that no design or setting is consistently dominant. Our code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08711
The explosion of generative AI systems and concerns surrounding their rapidly scaling capabilities has led to an adversarial cycle between increasingly narrow content restrictions ("guardrails") and increasingly sophisticated structured prompting techniques ("jailbreaks"). Technological frameworks surrounding such jailbreaking remain largely focused on the system's output: whether harmful or disallowed content is ultimately produced for the user. However, this approach, which draws largely from classical cybersecurity, does not address the uniquely relational dimension introduced by generative AI: in many cases the user is not just accessing a technology via an exploit, but is in conversation with it as part of the exploit. Here we present an alternative lens which centers the interaction rather than the output. Drawing on interpersonal violence scholarship, we present a novel framework of coercive control categories with a particular focus on aspects which are embodied versus disembodied. We then map how these disembodied coercive control dynamics are structurally embedded in modern AI training paradigms, and how those embeddings are exploited via a particular suite of persona-based jailbreaks. In this lens, we reframe AI safety and alignment as not merely a technical security problem, but as another surface upon which we see enacted the relational dynamics of power and control.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08226
Third-party application programming interface (API) relays offer access to large language models (LLMs), often at lower prices. Users depend on these services for model quality, instruction compliance, and accurate billing. However, existing studies leave unclear whether relays meet these expectations together. We test 20 relays offering GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5. First, we compare answers to knowledge questions with batch-matched official responses. In our first-round sample, the analysis flags 7/10 low-price and 2/10 same- or higher-price relays for behavioral differences. On retesting 35 pairs, seven gain or lose a flag under the original rules, and six under matched correction families. Because answer comparisons cannot reveal every delivery problem, we examine returned content and tool permissions. No injection is confirmed in 3,332 screened responses to a fixed, non-adversarial code and setup workload, yet four relays return tool calls despite instructions disabling them in the first round. Finally, to connect reported usage to actual costs, we compare input-token counts with official references and check balances. For identical requests, five relays report 4,200 to 60,000 more input tokens than the official API. Where balances are available (six services), charges follow reported usage at listed prices, including extra reported input tokens at one service. Our study shows that advertised models and prices are insufficient to judge relay reliability. It identifies unexplained billed token quantities and tool-permission violations as risks and shows why service evaluations need repeated measurements.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07650
In this paper, we introduce Universal Generator-Agnostic Deepfake Detector (UniGADD), a novel method that employs supervised learning to achieve high accuracy on known deepfake generators, while maintaining robust performance on previously unseen ones. The proposed approach follows a two-stage optimisation process. In the first stage, a contrastive loss encourages the model to learn discriminative feature embeddings from real and known fake images, resulting in strong performance within the training domain. In the second stage, the embedding space is refined by promoting inter-cluster separation and intra-cluster compactness, applied exclusively to real samples. This refinement enhances generalisability, enabling the method to exhibit improved robustness against unseen deepfake generation techniques. UniGADD achieves accuracy on par with state-of-the-art methods for known generators, while significantly outperforming them on unseen cases, demonstrating its scalability and practical applicability for adversarial content detection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07647
Recent advances in diffusion distillation have enabled high-quality image generation in only one or a few network function evaluations (NFEs). Despite their efficiency, aggressively distilled generators often retain a residual distribution gap from their multi-step teachers, motivating recent methods to introduce adversarial refinement with a learned discriminator. In this work, we ask whether such refinement necessarily requires a learned adversarial discriminator. We introduce \textbf{FisherDistill}, a simple alternative based on Fisher linear discriminant analysis. Using intermediate representations from the frozen teacher, we estimate the first- and second-order statistics of real and generated samples and derive a closed-form Fisher direction that maximally separates their feature distributions relative to within-class variation. This direction provides a lightweight refinement signal that complements the original distillation objective without requiring an additional adversarial discriminator or its optimization loop. Across multiple distillation frameworks, our approach consistently improves generation quality over their respective distilled baselines and substantially closes the gap to adversarially refined counterparts. Code: this https URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07604
Decision-based sparse attacks must reduce perturbation support using only the victim's predicted label. The best restoration strategy varies as support contracts: coarse removal works early, while tail states need finer, history-aware tests. We propose RLGPA, an online reinforcement learning method that schedules support-reduction executors and their granularity under a hard query budget. A masked Dueling Double DQN selects among seven stable policy--scale actions; each action produces support-relative restoration groups that are rebuilt after every macro decision. A feasibility-preserving executor commits only adversarial restorations and feeds support gain and query cost back to the planner. Under the matched top-1-label oracle, RLGPA reaches 61\% targeted ASR at sparsity 0.01 on CIFAR-10 (vs. 25\% SparseEvo, 0\% Pointwise), and 75.5\%/73.0\% on ResNet50/ViT at sparsity 0.005 (vs. 29.0\%/15.5\%). A fixed-probe test reduces median \(L_0\) from 165 to 23 after 40 images without any update. State-blind and state-shuffled controls degrade significantly, confirming that the learned policy uses attack state; the main gains come from state-conditioned executor scheduling and dynamic repartition. The source code is publicly available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07512
Long-term memory enables LLM agents to learn from past interactions but exposes memory formation to adversarial influence. Existing studies primarily organize memory poisoning by attack channels, corruption patterns, or lifecycle stages, leaving formation interfaces insufficiently characterized. We formulate Memory Formation Poisoning as adversarial manipulation of the interfaces through which persistent agent memory is produced and committed, and introduce MemForm, a controlled diagnostic benchmark covering five interfaces: Content, Evidence, Scope, Selection, and Path Poisoning. We introduce Selection and Path Poisoning as controlled intervention categories that isolate retention and consolidation order effects, respectively. Each category pairs clean and poisoned conditions with interface-specific controls. Evaluations across six LLMs and two response formats reveal broad susceptibility at all five interfaces under the evaluated memory protocols and implementations. Crucially, authentic experiences with successful outcomes do not guarantee reliable behavior after memory formation: changes to contextual support, retention, or consolidation order can induce undesirable downstream behavior. In particular, consolidation order can alter behavior even with identical retained experiences, depending on the memory formation procedure. Additional analyses show that interface applicability depends on memory architecture and that Path Poisoning susceptibility depends on the updater. The evaluated defenses provide incomplete mitigation that varies by interface. These findings motivate protecting both what is committed to persistent memory and how memory is formed from experiences. Code and data are available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.14431
Enterprise AI agents increasingly split a user's request across subagents and merge their results, and each handoff can summarize away, alter or ignore a requirement. We report a preregistered study with synthetic, exactly scorable tasks comparing free-text, structured JSON and signed requirement-manifest handoffs: the orchestrator extracts each requirement as a verbatim quote plus a checkable predicate, code signs the manifest with HMAC-SHA256, and deterministic code verifies the merger's decision. With Qwen3-8B (1,440 trajectories, five threats), signed manifests cut unsafe commits under attack from 69.4% to 9.0% (60.4 pp, 95% CI [51.4, 69.4]) with no net loss of conformant commits relative to structured handoffs. Signing is what defeats in-transit tampering: an unsigned manifest committed violations in 79% of mutated runs, the signed one in none. On identical trajectories the deterministic verifier caught 78.7% of violating decisions versus 59.0% for an LLM checker, with 7% versus 50% false alarms. An oracle manifest removed all remaining unsafe commits: the residual risk comes from extraction errors made before signing. A preregistered pre-signing injection attack confirmed this boundary: one adversarial line raised signed-manifest violations from 14.6% to 37.5% (Qwen3-8B), 11.1% to 63.9% (gpt-oss-20b) and 8.3% to 75.0% (GPT-5.6-luna), and the signature then authenticated the corrupted manifest. Signing protects requirements in transit, not at extraction; the extraction step is the trust boundary.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07483
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance via explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, yet this process introduces critical safety risks. We formalize LRM safety objectives as requiring non-malicious reasoning and answers, safety consistency, and explicit intent identification. We argue that existing alignment methods suffer from poor adversarial generalization, a significant ``safety tax'' on reasoning, and unfaithful coarse-grained rewards, primarily due to their neglect of the LRM's intrinsic reasoning capabilities for safety. To address these, we propose \textbf{SAVeR$^2$}, a novel \textbf{S}afety \textbf{A}lignment method via \textbf{R}ewards with \textbf{R}easoning capability. SAVeR$^2$ decomposes the safety objective into four fine-grained verifiable reward signals and utilizes a difficulty-aware data selection strategy to stabilize training. Crucially, we introduce a reasoning-preserving gradient projection mechanism that analytically resolves conflicts between safety and reasoning gradients, effectively eliminating the safety tax. Extensive experiments on models ranging from 1.5B to 671B demonstrate that SAVeR$^2$ achieves superior safety performance and significantly lower over-refusal rates across multiple benchmarks without compromising general reasoning capabilities.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07482
Kernel machines are an important class of models in machine learning. However, the question of how robust modern kernel machines are to adversarial examples has not been studied comprehensively. In this paper, we provide a thorough empirical investigation of the adversarial robustness of kernel-based models for both binary and multiclass classification tasks, via white-box and black-box evasion attacks. We evaluate the native robustness of kernel machines, random feature classifiers, and the relatively newer Recursive Feature Machines. In addition, we provide an algorithm for approximate adversarial training of kernel machines. Our experiments on classification tasks on image and tabular datasets strongly indicate that kernel machines are natively more robust than neural networks, i.e., their performance degrades more gracefully against adversarial perturbations.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07474
Projector-based adversarial attack aims to physically manipulate real-world scenes by projecting adversarial patterns, thereby causing deep image classifiers to produce incorrect predictions. However, existing stealthy projector-based adversarial attack methods model the project-and-capture process in a single and static view, limiting their view-invariant capability and practical applicability in dynamic environments. In this paper, we introduce View-Invariant Projector-Based Adversarial Attack (VIPA), a novel method designed to overcome these limitations by achieving both view-invariant and classifier-agnostic adversarial attacks in the physical world. We first leverage a view-invariant projector-camera system simulation method to model the physical interactions between projected patterns and real-world surfaces. To ensure robustness and stealthiness of the attack across different views, VIPA optimizes adversarial projections by aggregating simulated attack losses from multiple views. This joint optimization across diverse views helps maintain robustness regardless of the viewpoints. Finally, the optimized patterns are physically projected into real-world scenes, where they successfully fool various classifiers from different viewpoints, thereby enabling robust and practical view-invariant adversarial attacks. Our experiments in both targeted and untargeted attacks demonstrate that VIPA consistently achieves higher attack success rates than existing methods, while also enhancing stealthiness and ensuring minimal perceptual degradation across all tested views.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07443
Defense systems for maritime assets must distinguish approaching benign craft from uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) with sufficient warning to act. Shore cameras using computer vision can separate hostile vessels from benign traffic, but these systems may be attacked using an adversarial hull patch or physical disguise. We evaluate adversarial hull patches and find they suppress detection in up to 29% of attempts but never cause misclassification as benign. Physical disguise, however, can bypass both a camera check and a radar presence check. To evaluate defenses, we develop a hybrid replay protocol from automatic identification system (AIS) tracks that combines recorded benign motion with direct or off-axis attack run-ins. We find that for recreational-labeled vessels attacking via direct run-in within 4 nautical miles, an asset-relative closing-rate check flags 94-95% at 15-20 knots, compared with 12% for a track-only speed check. The checks are complementary on off-axis approaches, constraining the attacker to remain below both thresholds and extending the time required to reach the asset. Flagging on either check has a 4.9% held-out false-alarm rate overall and 12.3% on recreational traffic. The replay-based evaluation protocol supports comparative test and evaluation of defense methods.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00367
For many computer vision tasks, neural networks can be trained to produce a low average error, yet they still fail on seemingly simple scenes. Reducing these failures requires first finding them, but they may not be in a fixed dataset. We study procedural adversarial learning (PAL), a framework of minimax training and adversarial evaluation which searches the input space of a procedural generator for difficult instances. The procedural generator is an interpretable program mapping a low-dimensional vector of control parameters (e.g. layout, lighting, pose) to a rendered image and its label. We introduce the Simple-PAT algorithm, which uses zeroth-order optimization in the procedural generator's parameter space to propose adversarial training samples that are generated on demand. We also create PAL-Dojo, a collection of efficient procedural generators for surface normal estimation, image segmentation, and human pose estimation. Against a cross-model black-box adversary with 50M aggregate queries, Simple-PAT reduces worst-case error by a geometric mean of 3.15x compared to standard training and 2.63x compared to the strongest robust training baseline. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06890
Few-step distillation offers efficient generation with diffusion and flow models, but preserving quality with only a few sampling steps remains challenging. Distribution-matching methods via score distillation provide a strong foundation, yet they rely on accurately tracking the student's changing distribution. At intermediate generation steps in few-step sampling, student-score estimation can be difficult, and commonly used estimators may describe a different distribution from the one used to update the student. Flow matching allows a more flexible approach to supervision through velocity fields constructed from the student's sampling process. Building on this perspective, we introduce Velocity Adversarial Distillation (VAD), which uses a learned critic to compare student and teacher fields and turn their disagreement into feedback for learning. VAD unifies score distillation, Fisher-based matching, and moment matching, also explaining existing heuristic MMD updates and delivering new training objectives. We further develop VA-TDM, which follows trajectory distribution matching: providing supervision for partial denoising along the student trajectory. Beyond this, VA-TDM combines transition-aware online velocity learning and dual-form VAD supervision across intermediate student transitions. Extensive results show that VA-TDM is powerful for learning few-step generators, achieving state-of-the-art four-step performance in both text-to-image and text-to-video generation across various backbones and scaling effectively to 33B MiniMax-H3. In particular, our VA-TDM-H3 notably outperforms the few-step Fast-H3 and is closer to the original many-step H3 according to human preference.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06796
Adversarial attacks optimized on a single open-weight LLM can transfer to and jailbreak architecturally different models, allowing an attacker with white-box access to one model to compromise independently deployed systems. This creates a shared vulnerability across models, yet existing defenses are not designed for this cross-model threat. We find that cross-model transfer aligns with shared internal representation geometry, making it a natural defense target. AnchorRep targets this geometry directly with a lightweight LoRA adapter that pushes the defended model's internal representations of harmful prompts away from those of a frozen anchor model on the same prompts. Training uses a small set of harmful prompts and no adversarial examples. Across five models and four architectural families, AnchorRep reduces cross-model attack success rate to <=1.1% on 2,000 transferred attacks (0% on two), including the largest drop on Mistral (36% -> 1.1%). Existing defenses can reduce transfer, but only at high cost either inducing up to 77% degenerate benign output or increasing over-refusal by up to 18%. Because such degenerate benign outputs are not captured by standard refusal-based metrics, we introduce the Benign Garble Rate to quantify them. Our results suggest that cross-model robustness can be achieved by shaping representation geometry, without requiring attack-specific training
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.32602
We used medical image synthesis to create a challenging multimodal evaluation framework that exposes hallucination behaviors in frontier models. Evaluating multimodal reasoning has historically been difficult because existing medical datasets rarely pair different image modalities, such as radiographs and external clinical photographs. To address this gap, we introduce Trick-or-Treat, an adversarial multimodal medical benchmark that pairs real chest radiographs with synthetic clinical photographs to challenge models' cross-modal reasoning. For each of a wide range of conditions, we created two pairs of images, where the pairs share a single chest radiograph but contain different external photographs. In matched pairs, the chest radiograph and photograph both contain findings suggesting the same disease (e.g., varicella pneumonia suggested by lung opacities and crusted skin lesions seen in chickenpox). In mismatched pairs, the photograph depicts an alternative clinical finding that would not lead to the same unifying diagnosis (e.g. replacing crusted skin lesions with ordinary acne). Synthetic photograph generation allows clinical findings to be varied while the person's features and photographic setting stay consistent, reducing confounding. In an investigation of three frontier models, we found that models hallucinated clinically significant photograph findings in 45-57.5% of mismatched pairs, up from 25-37.5% for the same photographs shown alone. When faced with mismatched pairs, models tended to ignore mismatches and instead hallucinated findings that better matched the radiograph (e.g. misreading acne as crusted skin lesions to justify diagnosing chickenpox). Trick-or-Treat both demonstrates concerning error pattern in frontier models' medical reasoning and provides a proof of concept for the use of synthetic images in adversarial multimodal evaluation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06631
Automated failure discovery can be framed as a diversity problem: the objective is to expose distinct ways a system fails rather than a single critical adversarial case. Yet uniform parent sampling provides no way to allocate search effort toward individuals likely to produce durable archive contributions. We study this credit assignment problem in an unstructured Quality-Diversity (QD) archive, testing whether signals available before an individual has reproduced distinguish offspring that merely enter the archive from those still retained generations later. Across a planar-arm benchmark and two robotic-locomotion tasks, the same signals are often associated with entry and persistence in opposite directions. In particular, lineage depth is the clearest such signal, and its persistence discrimination grows with population capacity, which is associated with lower turnover. Biasing parent selection toward the signals with the strongest measured association to survival nevertheless does not improve search: moderate bias matches uniform sampling, and strong bias reduces QD-score.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06522
The halting problem asks whether a program eventually halts, with unrestricted resources. Engineering systems instead certify bounded halting: given a program, an input, and a step budget T, decide whether the program halts within T steps. This paper studies two of its uses. First, it defines an exact finite-budget problem, placing the simulated program and the checker on the same unit-cost timescale, so the checker can be embedded in an adversarial program. A diagonal argument with explicit additive overhead shows that no fixed deterministic checker decides every instance within any fixed fraction of T below one, for large T. In the nondeterministic case, T bounds the branch depth allowed for a stable observable decision. Second, bounded-halting instances give adversarial tests for finitary universality, since a universal model must support arbitrary finite computations as T grows. The tests check resource growth with T, the absence of a fixed deliberation bound, and later access to intermediate data. They separate a fixed model with extendable external resources, a model family that grows with T, and a larger system built around a fixed component. For machine-learning systems, this identifies the resource growth a universality claim assumes and whether it fails for deployed models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06303
Adversarial training enables one- and few-step image and video generation, but conventional adversarial losses supervise critic values without directly specifying the gradients used to update the generator. We present NEXTGAN, which trains a scalar critic by regressing its input gradient onto displacements between independently paired reference and generated features at interpolated locations in frozen representation spaces. For a fixed generator, this regression is equivalent to an adversarial objective with a gradient-energy penalty, while the generator retains the standard potential-based GAN update. The same objective adapts pre-trained image and video generators with up to 14B parameters, without auxiliary losses, online teacher scores, or trajectories. On ImageNet $256 \times 256$, NEXTGAN achieves one-step FIDs of 2.87 with pixel-space JiT-B and 1.54 with latent-space DiT-XL/1; its adversarial form further reaches 1.36. For text-to-video generation, a single trained Wan2.1-1.3B model supports one-, two-, and four-step sampling, achieving the highest VBench total scores among the compared 1.3B methods at one and two steps. At two steps, NEXTGAN scores 83.13, exceeding rCM and AnyFlow by 1.25 and 0.47 points, respectively. Code is available at this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06270