Do All LLMs Know When They're Being Harmful? A Reproducibility Study of Latent-Space Safety Probes Across Model Families
Khatri et al. (2026) [DOI: 10.1109/DSN-W70714.2026.00027] show that lightweight MLP probes on final-layer activations of a single 8B model (LLaMA-3.1-8B) detect harmful prompts at F1 competitive with guard models 1000x larger, using one probe per benchmark. We reproduce this pipeline end-to-end and extend it along two axes the original study leaves open. First, we test whether the result generalizes across other model architecture and scale by training identical probes on activations from models like Gemma-4-E4B, Mistral-7B-v0.3, and Qwen2-7B, using the three benchmarks (WildJailbreak, BeaverTails, AEGIS 2.0). Second, we test how much of the reported performance is affected by non-determi...
| Authors | Alizishaan Khatri, Dun Li Chan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 8 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 8 August 2026 |
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