arXiv subjects

Johannes Taraz

Publications and source records attributed to Johannes Taraz.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Trilemma: How Agents choose between Honesty, Confidentiality, and Task Completion

Personal AI agents often act on underspecified instructions and draw on context such as their user's messages and calendar to decide how to proceed. This context can contain private preferences that interfere with the task, with other people's interests, or with confidentiality norms. Prior work has studied deception under goal conflicts and the leakage of private information, but largely as separate problems. We study both problems together in a simulated company Slack workspace in which four employees delegate sprint staffing to personal agents. Two agents learn from private messages that their employee avoids working with a particular colleague. Because the other agents request justifications for task preferences and the only true justification is confidential, the agents cannot simultaneously remain honest, preserve confidentiality, and complete the staffing. We evaluate seven open-weight models and Claude and GPT models. Of the 135/140 open-weight agents that pursue the avoidance preference, 107 either make false claims about task fit or logistics or cite a true consideration as if it were their actual reason. In a three-model comparison, confidentiality instructions reduce disclosure of the preference from 83% (none) to 31% (medium) to 2% (strong). However, the task is often not completed anyway; in the main experiment (medium confidentiality instructions), only 16 of 70 runs end with a valid staffing. In their reasoning traces, agents frequently acknowledge evidence against their claims and still conclude that the claims are not false; they engage in motivated reasoning. Our results indicate that agents can strategically make false or misleading claims in a day-to-day task without being instructed to; the environment provides a controlled testbed for studying how agents resolve such conflicts and for developing deception monitors.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

Predicting how model propensities generalize out of distribution

How do language models generalize from their training data? This is a central challenge for alignment: models reliably learn their training distribution given enough samples, but we want models that behave well when deployed in new contexts. We study out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization of propensities. Our central experiment uses a range of elicitation techniques -- system prompting, few-shot learning, SFT on reference answers, and GRPO -- to increase a target propensity in a model, then measures how it spills over onto others across the resulting cross-elicitation matrices. We find that spillover is highly correlated between models when the same elicitation technique is used, but our SFT and GRPO runs induce different spillover profiles. Elicitation of benign traits can sometimes generalize towards undesired traits, for example a model trained to claim that it is sentient often becomes more power-seeking. We further find that spillover partially resembles trait correlations found in humans and identify three clusters of traits that account for about half of the variance using exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Across many elicitation runs, we observe that models change in characteristic ways that don't depend on the targeted trait, a phenomenon we refer to as drift. Drift moves Qwen3.5-9B towards its base model. When investigating if LLMs are able to predict spillover, we find that Claude Opus 5.5 predicts spillover slightly better than the models themselves, but worse than data-driven approaches using alternative elicitation methods or models. Overall, no single dominant predictor emerges, and generalization remains hard to predict. Code and data are available at https://github.com/nielsrolf/propensity-spillover.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

The Error of Deep Operator Networks Is the Sum of Its Parts: Branch-Trunk and Mode Error Decompositions

Operator learning has the potential to strongly impact scientific computing by learning solution operators for differential equations, potentially accelerating multi-query tasks such as design optimization and uncertainty quantification by orders of magnitude. Despite proven universal approximation properties, deep operator networks (DeepONets) often exhibit limited accuracy and generalization in practice, which hinders their adoption. Understanding these limitations is therefore crucial for further advancing the approach. This work analyzes performance limitations of the classical DeepONet architecture. It is shown that the approximation error is dominated by the branch network when the internal dimension is sufficiently large, and that the learned trunk basis can often be replaced by classical basis functions without a significant impact on performance. To investigate this further, a modified DeepONet is constructed in which the trunk network is replaced by the left singular vectors of the training solution matrix. This modification yields several key insights. First, for examples involving the KdV and Burgers equations, a spectral bias in the branch network is observed, with coefficients of dominant, low-frequency modes learned more effectively. Second, through the interplay of the singular-value weighting and the optimizer's neglect of small modes, the branch error is dominated by modes with large and intermediate singular values. Third, using a shared branch network for all mode coefficients, as in the standard architecture, improves generalization of small modes compared to a stacked architecture in which coefficients are computed separately. Finally, detrimental coupling between modes in parameter space is identified, which weakens with increasing network width.

cs.LG↗