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Jakub Hoscilowicz

Publications and source records attributed to Jakub Hoscilowicz.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

Steerability of Instrumental-Convergence Tendencies in LLMs

We examine two properties of AI systems: capability (what a system can do) and steerability (how reliably one can shift behavior toward intended outcomes). A central question is whether capability growth reduces steerability and risks control collapse. We also distinguish between authorized steerability (builders reliably reaching intended behaviors) and unauthorized steerability (attackers eliciting disallowed behaviors). This distinction highlights a fundamental safety--security dilemma of AI models: safety requires high steerability to enforce control (e.g., stop/refuse), while security requires low steerability for malicious actors to elicit harmful behaviors. This tension presents a significant challenge for open-weight models, which currently exhibit high steerability via common techniques like fine-tuning or adversarial attacks. Using Qwen3 and InstrumentalEval, we find that a short anti-instrumental prompt suffix sharply reduces the measured convergence rate (e.g., shutdown avoidance, self-replication). For Qwen3-30B Instruct, the convergence rate drops from 81.69% under a pro-instrumental suffix to 2.82% under an anti-instrumental suffix. Under anti-instrumental prompting, larger aligned models show lower convergence rates than smaller ones (Instruct: 2.82% vs. 4.23%; Thinking: 4.23% vs. 9.86%). Code is available at github.com/j-hoscilowicz/instrumental_steering.

cs.CL

Adversarial Confusion Attack: Disrupting Multimodal Large Language Models

We introduce the Adversarial Confusion Attack, a new class of threats against multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Unlike jailbreaks or targeted misclassification, the goal is to induce systematic disruption that makes the model generate incoherent or confidently incorrect outputs. Practical applications include embedding such adversarial images into websites to prevent MLLM-powered AI Agents from operating reliably. The proposed attack maximizes next-token entropy using a small ensemble of open-source MLLMs. In the white-box setting, we show that a single adversarial image can disrupt all models in the ensemble, both in the full-image and Adversarial CAPTCHA settings. Despite relying on a basic adversarial technique (PGD), the attack generates perturbations that transfer to both unseen open-source (e.g., Qwen3-VL) and proprietary (e.g., GPT-5.1) models.

cs.CL

TinyClick: Single-Turn Agent for Empowering GUI Automation

We present an UI agent for user interface (UI) interaction tasks, using Vision-Language Model Florence-2-Base. The agent's primary task is identifying the screen coordinates of the UI element corresponding to the user's command. It demonstrates very strong performance on Screenspot and OmniAct annotations, while maintaining a very small size of 0.27B parameters and minimal latency. Moreover, training needs small compute budget of 56 GPU-hours (worth about 40 USD). Relevant improvement comes from vision-specific multi-task training and MLLM-based data augmentation. We hope that decreased needs for expensive compute resources and manually annotated data will allow to facilitate more inclusive and sustainable research of UI agents.

cs.HC

Large Language Models as Carriers of Hidden Messages

Simple fine-tuning can embed hidden text into large language models (LLMs), which is revealed only when triggered by a specific query. Applications include LLM fingerprinting, where a unique identifier is embedded to verify licensing compliance, and steganography, where the LLM carries hidden messages disclosed through a trigger query. Our work demonstrates that embedding hidden text via fine-tuning, although seemingly secure due to the vast number of potential triggers, is vulnerable to extraction through analysis of the LLM's output decoding process. We introduce an extraction attack called Unconditional Token Forcing (UTF), which iteratively feeds tokens from the LLM's vocabulary to reveal sequences with high token probabilities, indicating hidden text candidates. We also present Unconditional Token Forcing Confusion (UTFC), a defense paradigm that makes hidden text resistant to all known extraction attacks without degrading the general performance of LLMs compared to standard fine-tuning. UTFC has both benign (improving LLM fingerprinting) and malign applications (using LLMs to create covert communication channels).

cs.CL

ClickAgent: Enhancing UI Location Capabilities of Autonomous Agents

With the growing reliance on digital devices equipped with graphical user interfaces (GUIs), such as computers and smartphones, the need for effective automation tools has become increasingly important. While multimodal large language models (MLLMs) like GPT-4V excel in many areas, they struggle with GUI interactions, limiting their effectiveness in automating everyday tasks. In this paper, we introduce ClickAgent, a novel framework for building autonomous agents. In ClickAgent, the MLLM handles reasoning and action planning, while a separate UI location model (e.g., SeeClick) identifies the relevant UI elements on the screen. This approach addresses a key limitation of current-generation MLLMs: their difficulty in accurately locating UI elements. ClickAgent outperforms other prompt-based autonomous agents (CogAgent, AppAgent) on the AITW benchmark. Our evaluation was conducted on both an Android smartphone emulator and an actual Android smartphone, using the task success rate as the key metric for measuring agent performance.

cs.HC

Non-Linear Inference Time Intervention: Improving LLM Truthfulness

In this work, we explore LLM's internal representation space to identify attention heads that contain the most truthful and accurate information. We further developed the Inference Time Intervention (ITI) framework, which lets bias LLM without the need for fine-tuning. The improvement manifests in introducing a non-linear multi-token probing and multi-token intervention: Non-Linear ITI (NL-ITI), which significantly enhances performance on evaluation benchmarks. NL-ITI is tested on diverse multiple-choice datasets, including TruthfulQA, on which we report over 16% relative MC1 (accuracy of model pointing to the correct answer) improvement with respect to the baseline ITI results. Moreover, we achieved a 10% relative improvement over the recently released Truth Forest (TrFf) method that also focused on ITI improvement.

cs.CL

Large Language Models for Expansion of Spoken Language Understanding Systems to New Languages

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) models are a core component of voice assistants (VA), such as Alexa, Bixby, and Google Assistant. In this paper, we introduce a pipeline designed to extend SLU systems to new languages, utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) that we fine-tune for machine translation of slot-annotated SLU training data. Our approach improved on the MultiATIS++ benchmark, a primary multi-language SLU dataset, in the cloud scenario using an mBERT model. Specifically, we saw an improvement in the Overall Accuracy metric: from 53% to 62.18%, compared to the existing state-of-the-art method, Fine and Coarse-grained Multi-Task Learning Framework (FC-MTLF). In the on-device scenario (tiny and not pretrained SLU), our method improved the Overall Accuracy from 5.31% to 22.06% over the baseline Global-Local Contrastive Learning Framework (GL-CLeF) method. Contrary to both FC-MTLF and GL-CLeF, our LLM-based machine translation does not require changes in the production architecture of SLU. Additionally, our pipeline is slot-type independent: it does not require any slot definitions or examples.

cs.CL