Squish and Release: Exposing Hidden Hallucinations by Making Them Surface as Safety Signals
Language models detect false premises when asked directly but absorb them under conversational pressure, producing authoritative professional output built on errors they already identified. This failure - order-gap hallucination - is invisible to output inspection because the error migrates into the activation space of the safety circuit, suppressed but not erased. We introduce Squish and Release (S&R), an activation-patching architecture with two components: a fixed detector body (layers 24-31, the localized safety evaluation circuit) and a swappable detector core (an activation vector controlling perception direction). A safety core shifts the model from compliance toward detection; an ...
| Authors | Nathaniel Oh, Paul Attie |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 27 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 March 2026 |
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