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Sprint projectFeb 2, 2026indonesia

DOMAIN OWNERSHIP PROBING

Rijal Saepuloh, Ifeoma Ilechukwu, Valmik nahata, Saahir Vazirani · Team DOMAIN

Submitted to The Technical AI Governance Challenge. Sprint projects are early-stage work by participants, not Apart Research publications.

We propose Domain Ownership Probing (DOP), a lightweight verification method that evaluates a model’s internal representation structure instead of its stochastic text outputs. DomainProbe embeds domain-specific statements, forms prototype centroids, and computes domain ownership win-rate and cohesion to assess whether knowledge domains are consistently encoded. By adding an auto-tuned layer search, the method remains effective for both encoder models and decoder-only LLMs, supporting practical AI governance and compliance verification without exposing training datasets.

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How much would this matter for AI safety if it worked? How innovative is it? For scores of 4-5: is this actually new to the field, or replicating recent work?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Negligible. No clear problem addressed, or no meaningful novelty.
  2. 2Limited. Addresses a real problem but with a generic or well-trodden approach. Incremental at best.
  3. 3Moderate. Clear problem with a reasonable approach; some novelty in framing or method beyond routine application of existing tools.
  4. 4Significant. Important problem with an original approach, or identifies a neglected problem area. A valuable contribution others could build on.
  5. 5Exceptional. Tackles a critical AI safety problem with a genuinely novel approach, or opens a new research direction. Clear theory of change. You'd be excited to share this with researchers in the area.

How sound are methodology, implementation, and findings?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Seriously flawed. Methodology broken, results uninterpretable, or implementation doesn't work.
  2. 2Weak. Approach has significant gaps: missing validation, flawed experimental design, or incomplete implementation.
  3. 3Competent. Technically solid given the short duration. Methodology makes sense, results are interpretable, limitations acknowledged, work builds toward clear conclusions.
  4. 4Strong. Thorough methodology with convincing validation. Results clearly support conclusions. Immediately useful for future work.
  5. 5Exceptional. Ambitious scope executed rigorously. Surprising findings, novel methods, or unusually robust validation.

How clearly are work, findings, and impact potential communicated?

Scoring guide
  1. 1Incomprehensible. Cannot determine what the project is actually claiming or doing.
  2. 2Hard to follow. Key information buried, missing, or diluted by excessive length. Significant effort to extract main points.
  3. 3Clear enough. Can understand the problem, approach, and results without undue effort. Core content clearly present: problem, method, findings, limitations.
  4. 4Well presented. Easy to follow, well-structured, appropriate level of detail. Target audience would get it quickly.
  5. 5Exceptionally clear. A pleasure to read. Complex ideas made accessible. Could serve as a model for how to present this type of work.

  1. Thank you for pointing to embedding geometry as a stable and privacy-preserving signal for capability verification. I am excited about work that enables model assessment without exposing proprietary data or relying on gameable benchmarks. The main gap is in connecting this geometric signal to dangerous capabilities evaluation. A model clustering biology probes together tells us it has structured representations of biology, but it does not tell us whether the model can provide bioweapons development uplift.

  2. The team clearly shows technical aptitude — the pipeline is well-constructed and the implementation appears sound. The core problem is that what this method demonstrates is that embeddings of topically similar statements are close together in embedding space, which is a well-established property of language model representations. It's not clear that this gives us a way to distinguish between safe models and unsafe models — only between good models and bad models. Any competent model will cluster biology statements together; one that doesn't is simply poorly trained. My core recommendation would be to think about what kind of probes would yield actionable information for auditors, and work backward from there.

Cite this project

@misc{saepuloh2026domain,
  title = {{DOMAIN OWNERSHIP PROBING}},
  author = {Rijal Saepuloh and Ifeoma Ilechukwu and Valmik nahata and Saahir Vazirani},
  year = {2026},
  month = feb,
  note = {Submitted to The Technical AI Governance Challenge, an Apart Research Sprint},
  howpublished = {\url{https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/domain-ownership-probing-gt3j}},
  url = {https://apartresearch.com/sprints/projects/domain-ownership-probing-gt3j}
}

Build something like this at the next Sprint

AI Collusion Research Sprint · Oct 23 - 25, 2026