Skip to content

Capability-Gated Language Models: Security Composes, Utility Does Not

Patrikas Vanagas Augustas Ma\v{c}ijauskas Laurynas Lopata
Sep 2026
Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Cybersecurity

Abstract

Deployed language model safeguards (safety fine-tuning, filtering, unlearning) vary by principal only outside the model weights: filters are reconfigured, tiers are multiplied, and artefacts are reissued; inside one set of weights every request meets the same model configuration. This motivates us to define capability-gated deployment: per-principal access control inside one set of weights, whose configurations form a lattice - meets accumulate a principal's restrictions and joins pool a coalition's reach. We instantiate it by sparse rank gating over an existing nested-factorisation mechanism, guide profile search with one-pass attribution, and read every result once from a pre-registered held-out split. Security composes: provably at meets under a monotone-elicitation assumption we falsify pointwise. In two lineages the median held-out meet deepens suppression; the one effect surviving correction strengthens it. Utility does not: individually harmless profiles can compose to retention and fluency damage, and no compositional bound exists.

View source

Similar papers

#machine learning Review Open access Oct 2014

Software development in startup companies: A systematic mapping study

The results indicate that software engineering work practices are chosen opportunistically, adapted and configured to provide value under the constrains imposed by the startup context.

Nicolò Paternoster, Carmine Giardino, M. Unterkalmsteiner et al. · 394 citations · ⚡54

Diffusion models as plug-and-play priors

The possibility of inferring high-dimensional data inference in a model that consists of a prior and an auxiliary differentiable constraint given some additional information is considered, thereby allowing a range of potential applications in adapting models to new domains and tasks.

Alexandros Graikos, Esmeralda S. Whitammer, N. Jojic et al. · 316 citations · ⚡15

Trajectory Balance: Improved Credit Assignment in GFlowNets

It is proved that any global minimizer of the trajectory balance objective can define a policy that samples exactly from the target distribution, and empirically demonstrate the benefits of the trajectories balance objective for GFlowNet convergence, diversity of generated samples, and robustness to long action sequences and large action spaces.

Esmeralda S. Whitammer, Moksh Jain, Emmanuel Bengio et al. · 302 citations · ⚡60
#artificial intelligence Open access May 2023

Evaluating the Performance of Large Language Models on GAOKAO Benchmark

GAOKAO-Bench is introduced, an intuitive benchmark that employs questions from the Chinese GAOKAO examination as test samples, including both subjective and objective questions that contribute a robust evaluation benchmark for future large language models and offers valuable insights into the advantages and limitations of such models.

Xiaotian Zhang, Chun-yan Li, Yi Zong et al. · 216 citations · ⚡17
#machine learning Review Open access Jun 2014

Why Early-Stage Software Startups Fail: A Behavioral Framework

This state-of-practice investigation was performed using a literature review followed by a multiple-case study approach and presents how inconsistency between managerial strategies and execution can lead to failure by means of a behavioral framework.

Carmine Giardino, Xiaofeng Wang, P. Abrahamsson · 175 citations · ⚡19
#machine learning Review Open access Oct 2016

“Failures” to be celebrated: an analysis of major pivots of software startups

This study conducts a case survey study based on the secondary data of the major pivots happened in 49 software startups, and demonstrates that customer need pivot is the most common among all pivot types.

Sohaib Shahid Bajwa, Xiaofeng Wang, Anh Nguyen-Duc et al. · 127 citations · ⚡15

Related blog posts

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