cs.AIJun 8, 2026

PRISM: Recovering Instruction Sets from Language Model Activations

Authors: Gilad GresselRahul PankajakshanJulia DiamentEfim HudisKrishnashree AchuthanYisroel Mirsky

Organizations: Center for Cybersecurity Systems & Networks, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham · 3Ben-Gurion University of the Negev · 2Microsoft

Abstract

As LLMs are deployed as agents, reliable monitoring requires knowing not only what they output, but which instructions are steering their behavior. This is difficult when models infer unintended subgoals, follow contextual cues, or are influenced by prompt injections and hidden objectives. While activation-to-language methods suggest that hidden states can reveal natural-language information, existing approaches are not designed to recover the full set of simultaneous instructions, constraints, prohibitions, and subgoals active in agentic settings. We formalize this problem as instruction set retrieval and introduce PRISM, an activation-conditioned interpreter that decodes hidden states from a frozen target model into a faithful bullet list of active instructions. Unlike prior activation-to-language methods, PRISM is trained to recover instruction sets directly, using judge-guided GRPO to reward covered instructions and penalize unsupported ones. Across benign, constrained, prompt-injection, and hidden-objective settings, PRISM outperforms activation-to-language baselines, especially on security-relevant objectives.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. PRIME: Evaluating Prompt Resolution Under Incompatible Instructions in LLMs

    Jun 21, 2026Tehreem Javed, Shumaim Fatimah, Masooma Bakhtiari +2Conflict