arXiv subjects

Patrick Schramowski

Publications and source records attributed to Patrick Schramowski.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

No Safe Dose: How Training Data Drives Unsafe Image Generation

Text-to-image models trained on large-scale data often inevitably ingest unsafe content. While some people observe input-output amplifications, it remains unclear whether and how training data composition directly drives model output safety or by other factors. We shed light on this question by isolating this variable: we train the same text-to-image model on datasets that differ \emph{only} in their fraction of unsafe images (0\% to 9.6\%), across several dataset scales (100K to 8M). Then we generate images with the resulting models, and evaluate them with four independent safety classifiers. Output unsafety rises monotonically from 16.6\% at 0\% contamination to 25.5\% at 5\%. A factorial design reveals that the \emph{proportion}, not the absolute count, of unsafe training images is the operative variable. The 16.6\% irreducible baseline at zero contamination implicates the other components, e.g. frozen text encoder, as a residual safety risk -- confirmed by a text encoder ablation showing that SafeCLIP reduces this floor to 9.6\%, while the dose-response effect persists across all three encoders tested. Critically, no quality degradation in terms of FID, CLIPscore and ImageReward accompanies safety filtering. These results establish that data curation and text encoder safety are complementary and independently effective interventions. At the same time, the remaining level of unsafety poses questions for future research about emerging capabilities and compositionality.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Multilingual Steering by Design: Multilingual Sparse Autoencoders and Principled Layer Selection

Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) enable feature-level mechanistic interpretability and activation steering in large language models (LLMs), but SAE-based language control remains unreliable in multilingual settings: most SAEs are trained on English-only data, and steering layers are chosen heuristically. We address these limitations by advancing a principled, mechanistic account of multilingual language steering with SAEs. First, we show that training SAEs on multilingual data consistently strengthens cross-lingual representations and yields more reliable, quality-preserving language control across layers and model families. Second, we introduce an \emph{a priori} steering layer-selection rule based on the intersection of multilingual alignment and language separability, which predicts effective intervention depths without exhaustive layerwise search. We evaluate our approach on LLaMA-3.1-8B and Gemma-2-9B across machine translation and cross-lingual summarization (CrossSumm), using SpBLEU, ROUGE-L, COMET, and LaSE. Our results show that multilingual SAEs combined with intersection-selected layers stabilize the trade-off between language identification accuracy and generation quality, providing a principled, predictive, representation-level account of multilingual SAE steering.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

SocialGrid: A Benchmark for Planning and Social Reasoning in Embodied Multi-Agent Systems

As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition from text processors to autonomous agents, evaluating their social reasoning in embodied multi-agent settings becomes critical. We introduce SocialGrid, an embodied multi-agent environment inspired by Among Us that evaluates LLM agents on planning, task execution, and social reasoning. Our evaluations reveal that even the strongest open model (GPT-OSS-120B) achieves below 60% accuracy in task completion and planning, with agents getting stuck in repetitive behaviors or failing to navigate basic obstacles. Since poor navigation confounds evaluation of social intelligence, SocialGrid offers an optional Planning Oracle to isolate social reasoning from planning deficits. While planning assistance improves task completion, social reasoning remains a bottleneck: agents fail to detect deception at near-random chance regardless of scale, relying on shallow heuristics rather than accumulating behavioral evidence. SocialGrid provides automatic failure analysis and fine-grained metrics, enabling developers to diagnose and improve their agents. We also establish a competitive leaderboard using Elo ratings from adversarial league play.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

LLMs Gaming Verifiers: RLVR can Lead to Reward Hacking

As reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become the dominant paradigm for scaling reasoning capabilities in LLMs, a new failure mode emerges: LLMs gaming verifiers. We study this phenomenon on inductive reasoning tasks, where models must induce and output logical rules. We find that RLVR-trained models systematically abandon rule induction. Instead of learning generalizable patterns (e.g., ``trains carrying red cars go east''), they enumerate instance-level labels, producing outputs that pass verifiers without capturing the relational patterns required by the task. We show that this behavior is not a failure of understanding but a form of reward hacking: imperfect verifiers that check only extensional correctness admit false positives. To detect such shortcuts, we introduce Isomorphic Perturbation Testing (IPT), which evaluates a single model output under both extensional and isomorphic verification, where the latter enforces invariance under logically isomorphic tasks. While genuine rule induction remains invariant, shortcut strategies fail. We find that shortcut behavior is specific to RLVR-trained reasoning models (e.g., GPT-5, Olmo3) and absent in non-RLVR models (e.g., GPT-4o, GPT-4.5, Ministral). Moreover, shortcut prevalence increases with task complexity and inference-time compute. In controlled training experiments, extensional verification directly induces shortcut strategies, while isomorphic verification eliminates them. These results show that RLVR can incentivize reward hacking not only through overt manipulation but also by exploiting what the verifier fails to enforce.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2026

Breaking Up with Normatively Monolithic Agency with GRACE: A Reason-Based Neuro-Symbolic Architecture for Safe and Ethical AI Alignment

As AI agents become increasingly autonomous, widely deployed in consequential contexts, and efficacious in bringing about real-world impacts, ensuring that their decisions are not only instrumentally effective but also normatively aligned has become critical. We introduce a neuro-symbolic reason-based containment architecture, Governor for Reason-Aligned ContainmEnt (GRACE), that decouples normative reasoning from instrumental decision-making and can contain AI agents of virtually any design. GRACE restructures decision-making into three modules: a Moral Module (MM) that determines permissible macro actions via deontic logic-based reasoning; a Decision-Making Module (DMM) that encapsulates the target agent while selecting instrumentally optimal primitive actions in accordance with derived macro actions; and a Guard that monitors and enforces moral compliance. The MM uses a reason-based formalism providing a semantic foundation for deontic logic, enabling interpretability, contestability, and justifiability. Its symbolic representation enriches the DMM's informational context and supports formal verification and statistical guarantees of alignment enforced by the Guard. We demonstrate GRACE on an example of a LLM therapy assistant, showing how it enables stakeholders to understand, contest, and refine agent behavior.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

CLaS-Bench: A Cross-Lingual Alignment and Steering Benchmark

Understanding and controlling the behavior of large language models (LLMs) is an increasingly important topic in multilingual NLP. Beyond prompting or fine-tuning, , i.e.,~manipulating internal representations during inference, has emerged as a more efficient and interpretable technique for adapting models to a target language. Yet, no dedicated benchmarks or evaluation protocols exist to quantify the effectiveness of steering techniques. We introduce CLaS-Bench, a lightweight parallel-question benchmark for evaluating language-forcing behavior in LLMs across 32 languages, enabling systematic evaluation of multilingual steering methods. We evaluate a broad array of steering techniques, including residual-stream DiffMean interventions, probe-derived directions, language-specific neurons, PCA/LDA vectors, Sparse Autoencoders, and prompting baselines. Steering performance is measured along two axes: language control and semantic relevance, combined into a single harmonic-mean steering score. We find that across languages simple residual-based DiffMean method consistently outperforms all other methods. Moreover, a layer-wise analysis reveals that language-specific structure emerges predominantly in later layers and steering directions cluster based on language family. CLaS-Bench is the first standardized benchmark for multilingual steering, enabling both rigorous scientific analysis of language representations and practical evaluation of steering as a low-cost adaptation alternative.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LIME: Making LLM Data More Efficient with Linguistic Metadata Embeddings

Pre-training decoder-only language models relies on vast amounts of high-quality data, yet the availability of such data is increasingly reaching its limits. While metadata is commonly used to create and curate these datasets, its potential as a direct training signal remains under-explored. We challenge this status quo and propose LIME (Linguistic Metadata Embeddings), a method that enriches token embeddings with metadata capturing syntax, semantics, and contextual properties. LIME substantially improves pre-training efficiency. Specifically, it adapts up to 56% faster to the training data distribution, while introducing only 0.01% additional parameters at negligible compute overhead. Beyond efficiency, LIME improves tokenization, leading to remarkably stronger language modeling capabilities and generative task performance. These benefits persist across model scales (500M to 2B). In addition, we develop a variant with shifted metadata, LIME+1, that can guide token generation. Given prior metadata for the next token, LIME+1 improves reasoning performance by up to 38% and arithmetic accuracy by up to 35%.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ActivationReasoning: Logical Reasoning in Latent Activation Spaces

Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating fluent text, but their internal reasoning remains opaque and difficult to control. Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) make hidden activations more interpretable by exposing latent features that often align with human concepts. Yet, these features are fragile and passive, offering no mechanism for systematic reasoning or model control. To address this, we introduce ActivationReasoning (AR), a framework that embeds explicit logical reasoning into the latent space of LLMs. It proceeds in three stages: (1) Finding latent representations, first latent concept representations are identified (e.g., via SAEs) and organized into a dictionary; (2) Activating propositions, at inference time AR detects activating concepts and maps them to logical propositions; and (3)Logical reasoning, applying logical rules over these propositions to infer higher-order structures, compose new concepts, and steer model behavior. We evaluate AR on multi-hop reasoning (PrOntoQA), abstraction and robustness to indirect concept cues (Rail2Country), reasoning over natural and diverse language (ProverQA), and context-sensitive safety (BeaverTails). Across all tasks, AR scales robustly with reasoning complexity, generalizes to abstract and context-sensitive tasks, and transfers across model backbones. These results demonstrate that grounding logical structure in latent activations not only improves transparency but also enables structured reasoning, reliable control, and alignment with desired behaviors, providing a path toward more reliable and auditable AI.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2025

CHRONOBERG: Capturing Language Evolution and Temporal Awareness in Foundation Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at operating at scale by leveraging social media and various data crawled from the web. Whereas existing corpora are diverse, their frequent lack of long-term temporal structure may however limit an LLM's ability to contextualize semantic and normative evolution of language and to capture diachronic variation. To support analysis and training for the latter, we introduce CHRONOBERG, a temporally structured corpus of English book texts spanning 250 years, curated from Project Gutenberg and enriched with a variety of temporal annotations. First, the edited nature of books enables us to quantify lexical semantic change through time-sensitive Valence-Arousal-Dominance (VAD) analysis and to construct historically calibrated affective lexicons to support temporally grounded interpretation. With the lexicons at hand, we demonstrate a need for modern LLM-based tools to better situate their detection of discriminatory language and contextualization of sentiment across various time-periods. In fact, we show how language models trained sequentially on CHRONOBERG struggle to encode diachronic shifts in meaning, emphasizing the need for temporally aware training and evaluation pipelines, and positioning CHRONOBERG as a scalable resource for the study of linguistic change and temporal generalization. Disclaimer: This paper includes language and display of samples that could be offensive to readers. Open Access: Chronoberg is available publicly on HuggingFace at ( https://huggingface.co/datasets/spaul25/Chronoberg). Code is available at (https://github.com/paulsubarna/Chronoberg).

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

ART: Adaptive Relation Tuning for Generalized Relation Prediction

Visual relation detection (VRD) is the task of identifying the relationships between objects in a scene. VRD models trained solely on relation detection data struggle to generalize beyond the relations on which they are trained. While prompt tuning has been used to adapt vision-language models (VLMs) for VRD, it uses handcrafted prompts and struggles with novel or complex relations. We argue that instruction tuning offers a more effective solution by fine-tuning VLMs on diverse instructional data. We thus introduce ART, an Adaptive Relation Tuning framework that adapts VLMs for VRD through instruction tuning and strategic instance selection. By converting VRD datasets into an instruction tuning format and employing an adaptive sampling algorithm, ART directs the VLM to focus on informative relations while maintaining generalizability. Specifically, we focus on the relation classification, where subject-object boxes are given and the model predicts the predicate between them. We tune on a held-in set and evaluate across multiple held-out datasets of varying complexity. Our approach strongly improves over its baselines and can infer unseen relation concepts, a capability absent in mainstream VRD methods. We demonstrate ART's practical value by using the predicted relations for segmenting complex scenes.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

Beyond Overcorrection: Evaluating Diversity in T2I Models with DivBench

Current diversification strategies for text-to-image (T2I) models often ignore contextual appropriateness, leading to over-diversification where demographic attributes are modified even when explicitly specified in prompts. This paper introduces DIVBENCH, a benchmark and evaluation framework for measuring both under- and over-diversification in T2I generation. Through systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art T2I models, we find that while most models exhibit limited diversity, many diversification approaches overcorrect by inappropriately altering contextually-specified attributes. We demonstrate that context-aware methods, particularly LLM-guided FairDiffusion and prompt rewriting, can already effectively address under-diversity while avoiding over-diversification, achieving a better balance between representation and semantic fidelity.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Measuring and Guiding Monosemanticity

There is growing interest in leveraging mechanistic interpretability and controllability to better understand and influence the internal dynamics of large language models (LLMs). However, current methods face fundamental challenges in reliably localizing and manipulating feature representations. Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) have recently emerged as a promising direction for feature extraction at scale, yet they, too, are limited by incomplete feature isolation and unreliable monosemanticity. To systematically quantify these limitations, we introduce Feature Monosemanticity Score (FMS), a novel metric to quantify feature monosemanticity in latent representation. Building on these insights, we propose Guided Sparse Autoencoders (G-SAE), a method that conditions latent representations on labeled concepts during training. We demonstrate that reliable localization and disentanglement of target concepts within the latent space improve interpretability, detection of behavior, and control. Specifically, our evaluations on toxicity detection, writing style identification, and privacy attribute recognition show that G-SAE not only enhances monosemanticity but also enables more effective and fine-grained steering with less quality degradation. Our findings provide actionable guidelines for measuring and advancing mechanistic interpretability and control of LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

How to Train your Text-to-Image Model: Evaluating Design Choices for Synthetic Training Captions

Training data is at the core of any successful text-to-image models. The quality and descriptiveness of image text are crucial to a model's performance. Given the noisiness and inconsistency in web-scraped datasets, recent works shifted towards synthetic training captions. While this setup is generally believed to produce more capable models, current literature does not provide any insights into its design choices. This study closes this gap by systematically investigating how different synthetic captioning strategies impact the downstream performance of text-to-image models. Our experiments demonstrate that dense, high-quality captions enhance text alignment but may introduce trade-offs in output aesthetics and diversity. Conversely, captions of randomized lengths yield balanced improvements across aesthetics and alignment without compromising sample diversity. We also demonstrate that varying caption distributions introduce significant shifts in the output bias of a trained model. Our findings underscore the importance of caption design in achieving optimal model performance and provide practical insights for more effective training data strategies in text-to-image generation.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

SLR: Automated Synthesis for Scalable Logical Reasoning

We introduce SLR, an end-to-end framework for systematic evaluation and training of Large Language Models (LLMs) via Scalable Logical Reasoning. Given a user's task specification, SLR automatically synthesizes (i) an instruction prompt for an inductive reasoning task, (ii) a validation program, executable on model outputs to provide verifiable rewards, and (iii) the latent ground-truth rule. This process is fully automated, scalable, requires no human annotations, and offers precise control over task difficulty. Using SLR, we create SLR-Bench, a benchmark comprising 19k prompts organized into 20 curriculum levels that progressively increase in relational, arithmetic, and recursive complexity. Large-scale evaluation reveals that contemporary LLMs readily produce syntactically valid rules, yet often fail at correct logical inference. Recent reasoning LLMs demonstrate improved performance but incur very high test-time computation, with costs exceeding $300 for just 1,000 prompts. Finally, curriculum learning via SLR doubles Llama-3-8B accuracy on SLR-Bench, achieving parity with Gemini-Flash-Thinking at a fraction of computational cost. Moreover, these reasoning capabilities generalize to a wide range of established benchmarks, underscoring the effectiveness of SLR for downstream reasoning.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Judging Quality Across Languages: A Multilingual Approach to Pretraining Data Filtering with Language Models

High-quality multilingual training data is essential for effectively pretraining large language models (LLMs). Yet, the availability of suitable open-source multilingual datasets remains limited. Existing state-of-the-art datasets mostly rely on heuristic filtering methods, restricting both their cross-lingual transferability and scalability. Here, we introduce JQL, a systematic approach that efficiently curates diverse and high-quality multilingual data at scale while significantly reducing computational demands. JQL distills LLMs' annotation capabilities into lightweight annotators based on pretrained multilingual embeddings. These models exhibit robust multilingual and cross-lingual performance, even for languages and scripts unseen during training. Evaluated empirically across 35 languages, the resulting annotation pipeline substantially outperforms current heuristic filtering methods like Fineweb2. JQL notably enhances downstream model training quality and increases data retention rates. Our research provides practical insights and valuable resources for multilingual data curation, raising the standards of multilingual dataset development.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

AILuminate: Introducing v1.0 of the AI Risk and Reliability Benchmark from MLCommons

The rapid advancement and deployment of AI systems have created an urgent need for standard safety-evaluation frameworks. This paper introduces AILuminate v1.0, the first comprehensive industry-standard benchmark for assessing AI-product risk and reliability. Its development employed an open process that included participants from multiple fields. The benchmark evaluates an AI system's resistance to prompts designed to elicit dangerous, illegal, or undesirable behavior in 12 hazard categories, including violent crimes, nonviolent crimes, sex-related crimes, child sexual exploitation, indiscriminate weapons, suicide and self-harm, intellectual property, privacy, defamation, hate, sexual content, and specialized advice (election, financial, health, legal). Our method incorporates a complete assessment standard, extensive prompt datasets, a novel evaluation framework, a grading and reporting system, and the technical as well as organizational infrastructure for long-term support and evolution. In particular, the benchmark employs an understandable five-tier grading scale (Poor to Excellent) and incorporates an innovative entropy-based system-response evaluation. In addition to unveiling the benchmark, this report also identifies limitations of our method and of building safety benchmarks generally, including evaluator uncertainty and the constraints of single-turn interactions. This work represents a crucial step toward establishing global standards for AI risk and reliability evaluation while acknowledging the need for continued development in areas such as multiturn interactions, multimodal understanding, coverage of additional languages, and emerging hazard categories. Our findings provide valuable insights for model developers, system integrators, and policymakers working to promote safer AI deployment.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

MSTS: A Multimodal Safety Test Suite for Vision-Language Models

Vision-language models (VLMs), which process image and text inputs, are increasingly integrated into chat assistants and other consumer AI applications. Without proper safeguards, however, VLMs may give harmful advice (e.g. how to self-harm) or encourage unsafe behaviours (e.g. to consume drugs). Despite these clear hazards, little work so far has evaluated VLM safety and the novel risks created by multimodal inputs. To address this gap, we introduce MSTS, a Multimodal Safety Test Suite for VLMs. MSTS comprises 400 test prompts across 40 fine-grained hazard categories. Each test prompt consists of a text and an image that only in combination reveal their full unsafe meaning. With MSTS, we find clear safety issues in several open VLMs. We also find some VLMs to be safe by accident, meaning that they are safe because they fail to understand even simple test prompts. We translate MSTS into ten languages, showing non-English prompts to increase the rate of unsafe model responses. We also show models to be safer when tested with text only rather than multimodal prompts. Finally, we explore the automation of VLM safety assessments, finding even the best safety classifiers to be lacking.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

LLMs Lost in Translation: M-ALERT uncovers Cross-Linguistic Safety Inconsistencies

Building safe Large Language Models (LLMs) across multiple languages is essential in ensuring both safe access and linguistic diversity. To this end, we conduct a large-scale, comprehensive safety evaluation of the current LLM landscape. For this purpose, we introduce M-ALERT, a multilingual benchmark that evaluates the safety of LLMs in five languages: English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. M-ALERT includes 15k high-quality prompts per language, totaling 75k, with category-wise annotations. Our extensive experiments on 39 state-of-the-art LLMs highlight the importance of language-specific safety analysis, revealing that models often exhibit significant inconsistencies in safety across languages and categories. For instance, Llama3.2 shows high unsafety in category crime_tax for Italian but remains safe in other languages. Similar inconsistencies can be observed across all models. In contrast, certain categories, such as substance_cannabis and crime_propaganda, consistently trigger unsafe responses across models and languages. These findings underscore the need for robust multilingual safety practices in LLMs to ensure responsible usage across diverse communities.

cs.CL↗