Asymmetries in Spontaneous and Instructed Deception

arXiv:2609.00180 · cs.AI · Submitted 2026-08-31 · Read on arXiv

cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-08-31

Updated: 2026-08-31

Code: https://github.com/JosiahL98/Spont-I

Terminology

• Steering — 77× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 13× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Perplexity — 12× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• LLM judge — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adam — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 3× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Alignment — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Cosine Similarity — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generative AI — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Hallucination — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Interpretability — 1× in this paper · explained in 15 episodes
• Linear probe — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Scaffolding — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Sycophancy — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Understanding intermediate layers using linear classifier probes
• NNsight and NDIF: Democratizing Access to Open-Weight Foundation Model Internals
• Perfect Detection, Failed Control: The Geometry of Knowing vs. Steering in Language Models
• The Llama 3 Herd of Models
• Inference-Time Intervention: Eliciting Truthful Answers from a Language Model
• Pointer Sentinel Mixture Models
• One Probe Won't Catch Them All: Towards Targeted Deception Detection
• AI Deception: A Survey of Examples, Risks, and Potential Solutions
• From Sycophancy to Deception: A Unified Taxonomy for LLM Spontaneous Misalignment

Related papers

• MAVEN-T: Reinforced Heterogeneous Distillation for Real-Time Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction
• Model Discovery Agent: LLM-assisted Bayesian experiment design for data-efficient discovery of mechanistic world models
• The Clinician's Veto: Navigating Trust, Liability, and Uncertainty in Autonomous AI Prescribing
• MindHelper: Closed-Loop Embodied Mental-State Reasoning for Precision Intervention
• Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems
• VSAL: A Vision Solver with Adaptive Layouts for Graph Property Detection