arXiv:2603.28925v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Safety fine-tuning in Large Language Models (LLMs) seeks to suppress potentially harmful forms of mind-attribution such as models asserting their own consciousness or claiming to experience emotions. We investigate whether suppressing mind-attribution tendencies degrades intimately related socio-cognitive abilities such as Theory of Mind (ToM). Through safety ablation and mechanistic analyses of representational similarity, we demonstrate that LLM attributions of mind to themselves and to technological artefacts are behaviorally and mechanistically dissociable from ToM capabilities. Nevertheless, safety fine-tuned models under-attribute mind to non-human animals relative to human baselines and are less likely to exhibit spiritual belief, suppressing widely shared perspectives regarding the distribution and nature of non-human minds.
When to Call an Apple Red: Humans Follow Introspective Rules, VLMs Don’t
arXiv:2604.06422v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Understanding when Vision-Language Models (VLMs) will behave unexpectedly, whether models can reliably predict their own behavior, and if models adhere