Prompt-Injection Probes Learn the Conversation, Not Just the Injection

Abstract

Linear probes on a model's hidden states are used as cheap monitors for indirect prompt injection: they screen the tool outputs an agent reads and send suspicious ones to a slower second check, so every false alarm has a cost. But a probe learns whatever separates its training examples. The standard evaluation of injection probes can be passed without the model: conversation position and text lengths alone reach 0.91-0.98 AUROC. When each attack is compared with the same conversation without the injection, or with harmless text formatted like an injection, standard probes flag most of these harmless cases. We add such cases to the training data as matched negatives. Across six open models, in applications seen during training and at the default threshold, changing only the training data cuts false alarms on injection-free conversations from 41-80% to 4-27%, and on harmless look-alikes from 92-98% to 3-16%. With a threshold set on normal traffic, our probe still catches a median 95% of the attacks that fooled the agent (91% without our data). In new applications, false alarms stay low, but detection depends on the model and on how the threshold is set. The same data also helps a text-only filter.