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Main Author: Peiris, Hiranya V.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13466
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author Peiris, Hiranya V.
author_facet Peiris, Hiranya V.
contents The Claude Mythos Preview system card deploys emotion vectors, sparse autoencoder (SAE) features, and activation verbalisers to study model internals during misaligned behaviour. The two primary toolkits are not jointly reported on the most alignment-relevant episodes. This note identifies two hypotheses that are qualitatively consistent with the published results: that the emotion vectors track functional emotions that causally drive behaviour, or that they are a projection of a richer situational-context structure onto human emotional axes. The hypotheses can be distinguished by cross-referencing the two toolkits on episodes where only one is currently reported: most directly, applying emotion probes to the strategic concealment episodes analysed only with SAE features. If emotion probes show flat activation while SAE features are strongly active, the alignment-relevant structure lies outside the emotion subspace. Which hypothesis is correct determines whether emotion-based monitoring will robustly detect dangerous model behaviour or systematically miss it.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_13466
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Functional Emotions or Situational Contexts? A Discriminating Test from the Mythos Preview System Card
Peiris, Hiranya V.
Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
The Claude Mythos Preview system card deploys emotion vectors, sparse autoencoder (SAE) features, and activation verbalisers to study model internals during misaligned behaviour. The two primary toolkits are not jointly reported on the most alignment-relevant episodes. This note identifies two hypotheses that are qualitatively consistent with the published results: that the emotion vectors track functional emotions that causally drive behaviour, or that they are a projection of a richer situational-context structure onto human emotional axes. The hypotheses can be distinguished by cross-referencing the two toolkits on episodes where only one is currently reported: most directly, applying emotion probes to the strategic concealment episodes analysed only with SAE features. If emotion probes show flat activation while SAE features are strongly active, the alignment-relevant structure lies outside the emotion subspace. Which hypothesis is correct determines whether emotion-based monitoring will robustly detect dangerous model behaviour or systematically miss it.
title Functional Emotions or Situational Contexts? A Discriminating Test from the Mythos Preview System Card
topic Human-Computer Interaction
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13466