Skip to content

Author

Aashiq Muhamed

We have 5 of 30 papers

We haven’t gathered this author’s papers yet. Follow them and we’ll fetch their work.

Not the right person? Other researchers publish under this name.

#machine learning Preprint Sep 2026

Decoy Direction Optimization: A Post-Hoc Defense Against LLM Abliteration

Decoy Direction Optimization (DDO), a fast, post-hoc weight-editing defense that requires no base-model finetuning, is introduced, based on a simple mechanistic insight: ablation attacks rely on contrastive estimators to find the refusal direction.

Aashiq Muhamed, Mona T. Diab, Virginia Smith · 2 citations · ⚡1
#artificial intelligence Preprint Sep 2026

Pick Your Poison: Learning to Select Poison Sets for Stronger LLM Backdoor Attacks

This work formalizes poison selection as oracle-budgeted set optimization and introduces SAILS (Set-level Audit-Informed Iterative Learned Selection), which learns a set scorer from a few hundred finetune-and-evaluate runs, ranks millions of candidate sets, and audits only a small shortlist.

Aashiq Muhamed, Mona T. Diab, Virginia Smith et al. · 0 citations
#machine learning Review Sep 2026

MOLE: Detecting Insider Threats in AI Agents

Model misalignment, prompt injection, or operator misuse could lead AI agents operating frontier-lab accounts to exfiltrate model weights, poison training data, or weaken release gates. Existing benchmarks do not test whether defenders can detect this activity among routine work under a limited review budget. We introd...

Aashiq Muhamed, Virginia Smith · 0 citations

DSPA: Dynamic SAE Steering for Data-Efficient Preference Alignment

This work proposes Dynamic SAE Steering for Preference Alignment (DSPA), an inference-time method that makes sparse autoencoder (SAE) steering prompt-conditional, and audits the SAE features DSPA modifies, finding that preference directions are dominated by discourse and stylistic signals.

J. Wedgwood, Aashiq Muhamed, Mona T. Diab et al. · 1 citation
Conference Open access 2026

Mechanistic Interpretability Should Prioritize Feature Consistency in Sparse Autoencoders

This work proposes the Pairwise Dictionary Mean Correlation Coefficient (PW-MCC) as an assignment-based metric to quantify consistency and demonstrates that high levels are achievable with appropriate architectural choices for TopK SAEs on LLM activations with appropriate architectural choices.

Xiangchen Song, Aashiq Muhamed, Yujian Zheng et al. · 0 citations

We use cookies to run the site and, with your consent, for analytics and to show ads. See our Cookie Policy.