[Submitted on 8 Jul 2026]
Title:Latent Undertow: How Ordinary Typos Break Probes
View a PDF of the paper titled Latent Undertow: How Ordinary Typos Break Probes, by Elad David and 2 other authors
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Abstract:LLMs handle ordinary typing variation fluently: a typo or missing punctuation leaves both user intent and the model's response substantively unchanged. Yet probes that detect malicious prompts by reading the model's hidden states tell a different story: the same edit rotates the readout vector by 43--56 at the perturbed token, decaying below 15% within ~10 downstream tokens. Stacking ~3 common typos per message cuts a single-position prompt-injection probe's TPR@FPR$=1% by 12.0pp, a gap recalibration alone cannot close. Multi-position aggregation cures localized perturbations (
new | recent | 2026-09
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