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Adversarial Attacks Leverage Interference Between Features in Superposition

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Fundamental questions remain about when and why adversarial examples arise in neural networks, with competing views characterising them either as artifacts of the irregularities in the decision landscape or as products of sensitivity to non-robust input features. In this paper, we instead argue that adversarial vulnerability can stem from efficient information encoding in neural networks. Specifically, we show how superposition - where networks represent more features than they have dimensions - creates arrangements of latent representations that adversaries can exploit. We demonstrate that adversarial perturbations leverage interference between superposed features, making attack patterns predictable from feature arrangements. Our framework provides a mechanistic explanation for two known phenomena: adversarial attack transferability between models with similar training regimes and class-specific vulnerability patterns. In synthetic settings with precisely controlled superposition, we establish that superposition suffices to create adversarial vulnerability. We then demonstrate that these findings persist in a ViT trained on CIFAR-10. These findings reveal adversarial vulnerability can be a byproduct of networks' representational compression, rather than flaws in the learning process or non-robust inputs.


High-Power Training Data Identification with Provable Statistical Guarantees

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

The conventional approaches treat it as a simple binary classification task without statistical guarantees. A recent approach is designed to control the false discovery rate (FDR), but its guarantees rely on strong, easily violated assumptions. In this paper, we introduce Provable Training Data Identification (PTDI), a rigorous method that identifies a set of training data with strict false discovery rate (FDR) control. Specifically, our method computes p-values for each data point using a set of known unseen data, and then constructs a conservative estimator for the data usage proportion of the test set, which allows us to scale these p-values. Our approach then selects the final set of training data by identifying all points whose scaled p-values fall below a data-dependent threshold. This entire procedure enables the discovery of training data with provable, strict FDR control and significantly boosted power. Extensive experiments across a wide range of models (LLMs and VLMs), and datasets demonstrate that PTDI strictly controls the FDR and achieves higher power. These concerns raise the importance of identifying a specific, well-defined set of data allegedly used in training. To resolve such high-stakes disputes, claims must be supported by credible evidence that strictly controls the risk of false positives. This underscores the need for methods that provide rigorous statistical guarantees for identifying training data.


HebID: Detecting Social Identities in Hebrew-language Political Text

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Political language is deeply intertwined with social identities. While social identities are often shaped by specific cultural contexts and expressed through particular uses of language, existing datasets for group and identity detection are predominantly English-centric, single-label and focus on coarse identity categories. We introduce HebID, the first multilabel Hebrew corpus for social identity detection: 5,536 sentences from Israeli politicians' Facebook posts (Dec 2018-Apr 2021), manually annotated for twelve nuanced social identities (e.g. Rightist, Ultra-Orthodox, Socially-oriented) grounded by survey data. We benchmark multilabel and single-label encoders alongside 2B-9B-parameter generative LLMs, finding that Hebrew-tuned LLMs provide the best results (macro-$F_1$ = 0.74). We apply our classifier to politicians' Facebook posts and parliamentary speeches, evaluating differences in popularity, temporal trends, clustering patterns, and gender-related variations in identity expression. We utilize identity choices from a national public survey, enabling a comparison between identities portrayed in elite discourse and the public's identity priorities. HebID provides a comprehensive foundation for studying social identities in Hebrew and can serve as a model for similar research in other non-English political contexts.


What Do Agents Think One Another Want? Level-2 Inverse Games for Inferring Agents' Estimates of Others' Objectives

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Effectively interpreting strategic interactions among multiple agents requires us to infer each agent's objective from limited information. Existing inverse game-theoretic approaches frame this challenge in terms of a "level-1" inference problem, in which we take the perspective of a third-party observer and assume that individual agents share complete knowledge of one another's objectives. However, this assumption breaks down in decentralized, real-world scenarios like urban driving and bargaining, in which agents may act based on conflicting views of one another's objectives. We demonstrate the necessity of inferring agents' different estimates of each other's objectives through empirical examples, and by theoretically characterizing the prediction error of level-1 inference on fictitious gameplay data from linear-quadratic games. To address this fundamental issue, we propose a framework for level-2 inference to address the question: "What does each agent believe about other agents' objectives?" We prove that the level-2 inference problem is non-convex even in benign settings like linear-quadratic games, and we develop an efficient gradient-based approach for identifying local solutions. Experiments on a synthetic urban driving example show that our approach uncovers nuanced misalignments that level-1 methods miss.


MFTCXplain: A Multilingual Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating the Moral Reasoning of LLMs through Multi-hop Hate Speech Explanation

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Ensuring the moral reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a growing concern as these systems are used in socially sensitive tasks. Nevertheless, current evaluation benchmarks present two major shortcomings: a lack of annotations that justify moral classifications, which limits transparency and interpretability; and a predominant focus on English, which constrains the assessment of moral reasoning across diverse cultural settings. In this paper, we introduce MFTCXplain, a multilingual benchmark dataset for evaluating the moral reasoning of LLMs via multi-hop hate speech explanation using the Moral Foundations Theory. MFTCXplain comprises 3,000 tweets across Portuguese, Italian, Persian, and English, annotated with binary hate speech labels, moral categories, and text span-level rationales. Our results show a misalignment between LLM outputs and human annotations in moral reasoning tasks. While LLMs perform well in hate speech detection (F1 up to 0.836), their ability to predict moral sentiments is notably weak (F1 < 0.35). Furthermore, rationale alignment remains limited mainly in underrepresented languages. Our findings show the limited capacity of current LLMs to internalize and reflect human moral reasoning


MultiFinBen: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Multilingual and Multimodal Financial Application

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Real-world financial analysis involves information across multiple languages and modalities, from reports and news to scanned filings and meeting recordings. Yet most existing evaluations of LLMs in finance remain text-only, monolingual, and largely saturated by current models. To bridge these gaps, we present MultiFinBen, the first expert-annotated multilingual (five languages) and multimodal (text, vision, audio) benchmark for evaluating LLMs in realistic financial contexts. MultiFinBen introduces two new task families: multilingual financial reasoning, which tests cross-lingual evidence integration from filings and news, and financial OCR, which extracts structured text from scanned documents containing tables and charts. Rather than aggregating all available datasets, we apply a structured, difficulty-aware selection based on advanced model performance, ensuring balanced challenge and removing redundant tasks. Evaluating 21 leading LLMs shows that even frontier multimodal models like GPT-4o achieve only 46.01% overall, stronger on vision and audio but dropping sharply in multilingual settings. These findings expose persistent limitations in multilingual, multimodal, and expert-level financial reasoning. All datasets, evaluation scripts, and leaderboards are publicly released.


Are Language Models Consequentialist or Deontological Moral Reasoners?

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

As AI systems increasingly navigate applications in healthcare, law, and governance, understanding how they handle ethically complex scenarios becomes critical. Previous work has mainly examined the moral judgments in large language models (LLMs), rather than their underlying moral reasoning process. In contrast, we focus on a large-scale analysis of the moral reasoning traces provided by LLMs. Furthermore, unlike prior work that attempted to draw inferences from only a handful of moral dilemmas, our study leverages over 600 distinct trolley problems as probes for revealing the reasoning patterns that emerge within different LLMs. We introduce and test a taxonomy of moral rationales to systematically classify reasoning traces according to two main normative ethical theories: consequentialism and deontology. Our analysis reveals that LLM chains-of-thought tend to favor deontological principles based on moral obligations, while post-hoc explanations shift notably toward consequentialist rationales that emphasize utility. Our framework provides a foundation for understanding how LLMs process and articulate ethical considerations, an important step toward safe and interpretable deployment of LLMs in high-stakes decision-making environments. Our code is available at https://github.com/keenansamway/moral-lens .


mCLM: A Modular Chemical Language Model that Generates Functional and Makeable Molecules

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Despite their ability to understand chemical knowledge, large language models (LLMs) remain limited in their capacity to propose novel molecules with desired functions (e.g., drug-like properties). In addition, the molecules that LLMs propose can often be challenging to make, and are almost never compatible with automated synthesis approaches. To better enable the discovery of functional small molecules, LLMs need to learn a new molecular language that is more effective in predicting properties and inherently synced with automated synthesis technology. Current molecule LLMs are limited by representing molecules based on atoms. In this paper, we argue that just like tokenizing texts into meaning-bearing (sub-)word tokens instead of characters, molecules should be tokenized at the level of functional building blocks, i.e., parts of molecules that bring unique functions and serve as effective building blocks for real-world automated laboratory synthesis. This motivates us to propose mCLM, a modular Chemical-Language Model that comprises a bilingual language model that understands both natural language descriptions of functions and molecular blocks. mCLM front-loads synthesizability considerations while improving the predicted functions of molecules in a principled manner. mCLM, with only 3B parameters, achieves improvements in synthetic accessibility relative to 7 other leading generative AI methods including GPT-5. When tested on 122 out-of-distribution medicines using only building blocks/tokens that are compatible with automated modular synthesis, mCLM outperforms all baselines in property scores and synthetic accessibility. mCLM can also reason on multiple functions and iteratively self-improve to rescue drug candidates that failed late in clinical trials ("fallen angels").


Approximation theory for 1-Lipschitz ResNets

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

1-Lipschitz neural networks are fundamental for generative modelling, inverse problems, and robust classifiers. In this paper, we focus on 1-Lipschitz residual networks (ResNets) based on explicit Euler steps of negative gradient flows and study their approximation capabilities. Leveraging the Restricted Stone-Weierstrass Theorem, we first show that these 1-Lipschitz ResNets are dense in the set of scalar 1-Lipschitz functions on any compact domain when width and depth are allowed to grow. We also show that these networks can exactly represent scalar piecewise affine 1-Lipschitz functions. We then prove a stronger statement: by inserting norm-constrained linear maps between the residual blocks, the same density holds when the hidden width is fixed. Because every layer obeys simple norm constraints, the resulting models can be trained with off-the-shelf optimisers. This paper provides the first universal approximation guarantees for 1-Lipschitz ResNets, laying a rigorous foundation for their practical use.


GenoArmory: A Unified Evaluation Framework for Adversarial Attacks on Genomic Foundation Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We propose the first unified adversarial attack benchmark for Genomic Foundation Models (GFMs), named GenoArmory. Unlike existing GFM benchmarks, GenoArmory offers the first comprehensive evaluation framework to systematically assess the vulnerability of GFMs to adversarial attacks. Methodologically, we evaluate the adversarial robustness of five state-of-the-art GFMs using four widely adopted attack algorithms and three defense strategies. Importantly, our benchmark provides an accessible and comprehensive framework to analyze GFM vulnerabilities with respect to model architecture, quantization schemes, and training datasets. Additionally, we introduce GenoAdv, a new adversarial sample dataset designed to improve GFM safety. Empirically, classification models exhibit greater robustness to adversarial perturbations compared to generative models, highlighting the impact of task type on model vulnerability. Moreover, adversarial attacks frequently target biologically significant genomic regions, suggesting that these models effectively capture meaningful sequence features.