arxivcs.CRcs.AIcs.CLcs.ETcs.LG2026-06-28
Closing the Activation-Cone Blind Spot: Response-Time Probing and Unified Defense
Inference-time safety methods for large language models have proliferated, yet no systematic comparison exists. We evaluate five defense paradigms (no defense, static steering, CAST, AlphaSteer, probe-gated) across seven instruction-tuned models (7-31B) and five attack types (GCG…