aiqbench analysis
This research introduces a training-free method for detecting policy violations in LLMs by analyzing normalized hidden activations, effectively framing the task as an out-of-distribution problem. The approach significantly reduces computational overhead compared to fine-tuning or LLM-as-a-judge baselines while achieving superior F1 scores on complex benchmarks. By leveraging internal model representations without retraining, this technique offers a lightweight solution for deploying aligned models in sensitive sectors like finance and law.
Training-Free Policy Violation Detection via Activation-Space Whitening in LLMs
arXiv:2512.03994v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As organizations increasingly deploy LLMs in sensitive domains such as legal, financial, and medical settings, ensuring alignment with internal organizational policies has become a priority. Existing content moderation frameworks remain largely confined to the safety domain and lack the robustness to capture nuanced organizational policies. LLM-as-a-judge and fine-tuning approaches, though flexible, introduce significant latency and training cost. To address these limitations, we frame policy violation detection as an out-of-distribution (OOD) problem in the model's activation space. We propose a training-free method that operates directly on the LLM internal representations, leveraging prior evidence that decision-relevant information is encoded within them. Inspired by whitening techniques, we derive policy-violation scores directly from normalized representations of LLM hidden activations. Our method requires only the policy text and a small number of illustrative samples, making it lightweight and easily deployable. We extensively evaluate our method across multiple LLMs and challenging policy benchmarks. It achieves up to 86.0% F1, outperforming both fine-tuned and LLM-as-a-judge baselines while requiring substantially less computation. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/FujitsuResearch/LLM-policy-violation-detection
Abstract:As organizations increasingly deploy LLMs in sensitive domains such as legal, financial, and medical settings, ensuring alignment with internal organizational policies has become a priority. Existing content moderation frameworks remain largely confined to the safety domain and lack the robustness to capture nuanced organizational policies. LLM-as-a-judge and fine-tuning approaches, though flexible, introduce significant latency and training cost. To address these limitations, we frame policy violation detection as an out-of-distribution (OOD) problem in the model's activation space. We propose a training-free method that operates directly on the LLM internal representations, leveraging prior evidence that decision-relevant information is encoded within them. Inspired by whitening techniques, we derive policy-violation scores directly from normalized representations of LLM hidden activations. Our method requires only the policy text and a small number of illustrative samples, making it lightweight and easily deployable. We extensively evaluate our method across multiple LLMs and challenging policy benchmarks. It achieves up to 86.0% F1, outperforming both fine-tuned and LLM-as-a-judge baselines while requiring substantially less computation. Our code is publicly available at: this https URL
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2512.03994 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2512.03994v4 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.03994 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 265 words
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