{"paper":{"title":"On Almost Surely Safe Alignment of Large Language Models at Inference-Time","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.CL"],"primary_cat":"cs.LG","authors_text":"Haitham Bou Ammar, Ilija Bogunovic, Jun Wang, Matthieu Zimmer, Shyam Sundhar Ramesh, Xiaotong Ji","submitted_at":"2025-02-03T09:59:32Z","abstract_excerpt":"We introduce a novel inference-time alignment approach for LLMs that aims to generate safe responses almost surely, i.e., with probability approaching one. Our approach models the generation of safe responses as a constrained Markov Decision Process (MDP) within the LLM's latent space. We augment a safety state that tracks the evolution of safety constraints and dynamically penalize unsafe generations to ensure the generation of safe responses. Consequently, we demonstrate formal safety guarantees w.r.t. the given cost model upon solving the MDP in the latent space with sufficiently large pena"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2502.01208","kind":"arxiv","version":3},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2502.01208/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}