aspireai.
PUBLIC EDITION

Running a model on your own machine does not keep your prompt private, and a 12-million-execution campaign found four places it leaks

AspireAI community · arXiv (cs.CR, T-IFS preprint)
LLAnalyzer tests each confidentiality boundary in a consumer local-LLM stack separately: model loading, runtime memory, wrapper-level persistence and the serving interface. Against four open-weight model families and two deployment platforms, prompts were recoverable after inference because multiple plaintext representations survive in allocator-managed memory, sanitisation reduced that residue without removing it, and consumer wrappers extended prompt lifetime through plaintext persistence. At the serving boundary the authors found a previously undocumented authorization flaw in llama.cpp. The honest limit: a 24-hour AFL++ campaign found no parser crashes and no successful malformed GGUF loads, so the memory and wrapper findings are the substantive ones, not the parser.
Read the story and explore more from the AspireAI community.
Discover more stories
Stay curious.
THE BIG PICTURE
A FRESH PERSPECTIVE
Research
One distance function matched sparse-autoencoder features across layers and compressed feature circuits into supernodes
Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.
Swipe into something new
01 / 1729
The conversation continues
Explore Builds — projects by Kiran Adimatyam ↗
A fresh perspective changes everything.
ASPIREAI — STAY CURIOUS.