[2607.13346] The Refusal Residue: When Probes Catch Alignment Faking and When They Don't

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arXiv:2607.13346 (cs)

[Submitted on 15 Jul 2026]

Title:The Refusal Residue: When Probes Catch Alignment Faking and When They Don't

Authors:Aman Mehta<br>View a PDF of the paper titled The Refusal Residue: When Probes Catch Alignment Faking and When They Don't, by Aman Mehta

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Abstract:Alignment faking is dangerous because a model can appear compliant under monitoring while preserving behavior it would reveal when unmonitored. When no scratchpad is visible, behavior alone cannot distinguish strategic from genuine compliance. We ask whether hidden states reveal what outputs hide.

We run a 13-model sweep for naturally-emerging faking, then probe and steer hidden states on the two models that fake. Natural faking appears only in Qwen3-32B (+18.2pp) and Llama-3.1-8B (+24.4pp at n=10, p

Comments:<br>Accepted to the Mechanistic Interpretability Workshop at ICML 2026. 12 pages, 4 figures

Subjects:

Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Computation and Language (cs.CL)

Cite as:<br>arXiv:2607.13346 [cs.CR]

(or<br>arXiv:2607.13346v1 [cs.CR] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.13346

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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

Submission history<br>From: Aman Mehta [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Wed, 15 Jul 2026 00:11:42 UTC (485 KB)

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