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John Hughes

8 accepted papers

2026

Eliciting Harmful Capabilities by Fine-Tuning on Safeguarded Outputs

ICLR 2026poster

Model developers implement safeguards in frontier models to prevent misuse, for example, by employing classifiers to filter dangerous outputs. In this work, we demonstrate that even robustly safeguarded models can be used to elicit harmful capabilities in open-source models through \textit{elicitati…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Failures to Find Transferable Image Jailbreaks Between Vision-Language Models

ICLR 2025poster

The integration of new modalities into frontier AI systems offers exciting capabilities, but also increases the possibility such systems can be adversarially manipulated in undesirable ways. In this work, we focus on a popular class of vision-language models (VLMs) that generate text outputs conditi…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2025

How Do Large Language Monkeys Get Their Power (Laws)?

ICML 2025oral

Recent research across mathematical problem solving, proof assistant programming and multimodal jailbreaking documents a striking finding: when (multimodal) language model tackle a suite of tasks with multiple attempts per task -- succeeding if any attempt is correct -- then the negative log of the…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

Looking Inward: Language Models Can Learn About Themselves by Introspection

ICLR 2025poster

Humans acquire knowledge by observing the external world, but also by introspection. Introspection gives a person privileged access to their current state of mind (e.g. thoughts and feelings) that are not accessible to external observers. Do LLMs have this introspective capability of privileged acce…

2025

Why Do Some Language Models Fake Alignment While Others Don't?

NeurIPS 2025spotlight

*Alignment Faking in Large Language Models* presented a demonstration of Claude 3 Opus and Claude 3.5 Sonnet selectively complying with a helpful-only training objective to prevent modification of their behavior outside of training. We expand this analysis to 25 models and find that only 5 (Claude 3…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Debating with More Persuasive LLMs Leads to More Truthful Answers

ICML 2024oral

Common methods for aligning large language models (LLMs) with desired behaviour heavily rely on human-labelled data. However, as models grow increasingly sophisticated, they will surpass human expertise, and the role of human evaluation will evolve into non-experts overseeing experts. In anticipatio…

2020

Hierarchical Quantized Autoencoders

NeurIPS 2020poster

Despite progress in training neural networks for lossy image compression, current approaches fail to maintain both perceptual quality and abstract features at very low bitrates. Encouraged by recent success in learning discrete representations with Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoders (VQ-VAEs)…