Internal-State Probes Read the Situation, Not the Action: Three Negative Results for Pre-Action Misalignment Monitoring
Probes on model internals could help monitor agentic systems if they identify harmful text or tool actions before those actions are generated. We ask when an internal readout supports this stronger pre-action claim, rather than merely describing the prompt, construction contrast, or current trajectory. We test three methods across three model families: a Qwen2.5-Coder-32B-Instruct fine-tune/base direction, Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct probes at the last token of unsafe prefills, and Gemma-3-27B-IT emotion-concept vectors used for projection and steering in a blackmail tool-action scenario. Across these cases, construction validity, semantic legibility, and steering effects do not become robust p...
| Authors | Max Fomin, Elad David, Amit LeVi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 June 2026 |
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