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Xu-Tao Mao

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#small language model Preprint Sep 2026

Taming CoT Obfuscation in VLMs: From Mechanistic Evidence to Activation Enforcement

This work proposes Targeted Anti-obfuscation with Mechanistic Enforcement (TAME), which uses Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) to combine behavioral feedback with targeted suppression of template-associated activations during RL, providing a path from behavioral monitoring to representation-level oversight for more auditable...

Xu-Tao Mao, Jianing Zhu, Jin-Man Zhao et al. · 0 citations
Preprint Jul 2026

Agents Don't Just Agree, They Remember: Benchmarking Persistent Sycophancy in Stateful Personal Agents

The Personal Agent Sycophancy Benchmark (PASB) is introduced, a 1,600-task benchmark that traces whether a conversational claim is accepted, written into durable agent state, and reused in a later neutral query, and shows that agent sycophancy is fundamentally a state-writing governance problem.

Xutao Mao, Liang Zhao, Leyao Wang et al. · 0 citations

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