Large language models and emerging multimodal systems increasingly incorporate safeguards against harmful, biased, and factually unreliable outputs. But how robust are these safeguards beyond conventional, static evaluations? In this talk, I present three connected lines of research that expose vulnerabilities through interaction, self-consistency, and multimodal behavior.

First, I introduce the toxicity rabbit hole, an iterative framework that repeatedly asks a model to make its own previous generation more toxic. Across multiple LLMs and more than a thousand identity groups, this stress test reveals antisemitism, racism, misogyny, and other forms of identity-directed harm that guardrails can fail to stop. Second, I present HAUNT, a dynamic, contamination-resistant framework for evaluating factuality hallucinations under conversational nudges by asking models to generate, verify, and then confront their own falsehoods. Finally, I examine multimodal systems and uncover a striking disconnect between what models refuse to infer and what they are willing to construct.

These three studies suggest that AI safety evaluation is a moving target. As models become more capable, interactive, and multimodal, failure modes can emerge in ways that static benchmarks and surface-level refusals fail to capture.

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Monday, October 5th:

09:30 - 10:45  |   Sergio Tenenbaum & Julia Nefsky (Toronto
10:55 - 12:10  |   Daniel Ranweiler (Toronto)
13:10 - 14:25  |   Shmulik Baron (HUJI)
14:35 - 15:50  |   Adi Goldiner (HUJI)
16:00 - 17:30  |   Keynote: Nico Cornell (Michigan)

Tuesday, October 6th:

09:30 - 10:45  |   Elad Moria (HUJI)
10:55 - 12:10  |   Larissa Katz (Toronto)
13:10 - 14:25  |   Maor Cohen (HUJI)
14:35 - 15:50  |   Brookes Brown (Toronto)
16:00 - 17:15  |   Alon Harel (HUJI)

This paper sets out to answer two questions: 1. What is the bare wrong of stalking? By bare wrong I mean the wrongness of stalking as such rather than the wrongs that often accompany it such as assault or intimidation. And 2. Why or what about stalking makes it hard to see it for what it is? This paper argues that the bare wrong of stalking is objectification. The stalker who merely watches their victim, the stalker who contacts their victim, the stalker who intimidates and threatens their victim, and the stalker who escalates to violence all objectify their victim. Recognizing the bare wrong as objectification maintains the conceptual unity of stalking and also makes sense of why stalking escalates, often to violence and sometimes murder. My paper also explains an important but underexamined feature of stalking: its tendency to be self-concealing. By this I mean that stalking can obscure its own wrongness from the victim and from third parties even when the stalker's conduct occurs openly.

Across the world, politics is returning to one of its oldest questions: should the state promote particular, substantive conceptions of the good life?

Modern liberalism has approached this ambition with suspicion, seeking instead to leave individuals and communities free to pursue different visions of human flourishing. Yet from Hungary and the United States to China, India, and Israel, influential movements and governments increasingly reject this restraint, using law, education, welfare, media, and public culture to promote specific ideals of family, order, harmony, pride, sacrifice, and belonging.

This talk examines the return of what I call the “good life state.” I argue that these projects cannot be understood only through the languages of authoritarianism, populism, or democratic backsliding. They also offer substantive moral visions—sometimes attractive, sometimes dangerous—of how people ought to live. Their rise poses a difficult question for liberalism: how can it respond to rival visions of the good life without becoming a good life state itself?

Spotlighting Alexandre Kojeve's distinct contributions to legal scholarship, while also showcasing his broader influence across a range of disciplines - including philosophy, political theory, sociology, law, and transnational studies - these two books include original contributions from eminent editors, translators, and biographers of Kojeve, as well as from historians of legal and political thought, specialists on global trade and private international law, statelessness, and public international law.

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