What Do Compliance Detectors Read? An Audit of Activation Probes and Guard Models
The paper says tested compliance guards often ignore the rule they are supposed to enforce.
The authors call the failure “rule blindness”: deleting, shuffling, or swapping the governing rule did not change accuracy for the guards and activation probes they tested. One policy-conditioned guard could cite the relevant clause while barely changing its verdict when that clause was replaced with a permissive one. Their proposed Internal Compliance Score was cheap enough for audits, but it did not beat their registered baseline test and matched a bag-of-words model on pooled generalization. ArXiv · AI/CL/LG's note
The authors call the failure “rule blindness”: deleting, shuffling, or swapping the governing rule did not change accuracy for the guards and activation probes they tested. One policy-conditioned guard could cite the relevant clause while barely changing its verdict when that clause was replaced with a permissive one. Their proposed Internal Compliance Score was cheap enough for audits, but it did not beat their registered baseline test and matched a bag-of-words model on pooled generalization. ArXiv · AI/CL/LG's note
score 4