Work

Latent persona coordination as an attack surface in large language models

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Large language models are often secured primarily at the level of outputs. This Perspective argues that unauthorized use and manipulation should also be treated as attacks on latent persona coordination: a relational property of the internal state, comprising the relative dominance of assistant-like, truth-preserving, and safety-preserving representations over competing dispositions, the conflict between incompatible dispositions that are active at once, and the stability of that configuration under perturbation. Reframing jailbreaks, malicious fine-tuning, hidden-signal training and uncensoring as reweightings of this control state yields a testable prediction: that latent measurements taken after different attacks are better explained by a general drift component plus pathway-specific residuals than by pathway-specific effects alone, and that the resulting signatures could flag manipulation before unsafe outputs appear. We state what would refute this.

Source: npj Artificial Intelligence

DOI: 10.1038/s44387-026-00154-7

Authors: Giuseppe Riva, Stefania La Rocca

Institutions: Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, IRCCS Istituto Auxologico Italiano

Language: English

Topic: Adversarial Robustness in Machine Learning

Subfield: Artificial Intelligence

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,590

OpenAlex ID: W7212403318