The inattentional gap in task conditioned AI models that omit otherwise reportable safety critical signals
AI in radiology and other safety-critical workflows is evaluated on the hazards it is told to find, yet harm arises disproportionately from hazards no one specified. We show that conditioning a language or vision model on a narrow task suppresses its reporting of co-present, safety-critical signals it can otherwise report, a behavioral analogue of human inattentional blindness. Across radiology text scenarios and thoracic-image vision tasks, ordinary focused instructions suppressed reporting by up to 0.92; the gap ranged from minimal to complete across seven models, did not vary monotonically with scale, and persisted in a reasoning model, while one flagship model showed a robust safety-r...
| Authors | Kwan Soo Shin |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 25 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 August 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.