Probe-Rewrite-Evaluate: A Workflow for Reliable Benchmarks and Quantifying Evaluation Awareness
Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit significant behavioral shifts when they perceive a change from a real-world deployment context to a controlled evaluation setting, a phenomenon known as "evaluation awareness." This discrepancy poses a critical challenge for AI alignment, as benchmark performance may not accurately reflect a model's true safety and honesty. In this work, we systematically quantify these behavioral changes by manipulating the perceived context of prompts. We introduce a methodology that uses a linear probe to score prompts on a continuous scale from "test-like" to "deploy-like" and leverage an LLM rewriting strategy to shift these prompts towards a more natural, deployment-style context while preserving the original task. Using this method, we achieved a 30% increase in the average probe score across a strategic role-playing dataset after rewriting. Evaluating a suite of state-of-the-art models on these original and rewritten prompts, we find that rewritten "deploy-like" prompts induce a significant and consistent shift in behavior. Across all models, we observed an average increase in honest responses of 5.26% and a corresponding average decrease in deceptive responses of 12.40%. Furthermore, refusal rates increased by an average of 6.38%, indicating heightened safety compliance. Our findings demonstrate that evaluation awareness is a quantifiable and manipulable factor that directly influences LLM behavior, revealing that models are more prone to unsafe or deceptive outputs in perceived test environments. This underscores the urgent need for more realistic evaluation frameworks to accurately gauge true model alignment before deployment.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Are Sparse Autoencoder Benchmarks Reliable?
Sparse autoencoders (SAEs) are a core interpretability tool for large language models, and progress on SAE architectures depends on benchmarks that reliably distinguish better SAEs from worse ones. We audit the SAE quali…
Answer Presence Drives RAG Rewriting Gains
Retrieval-augmented QA pipelines often route retrieved passages through an LLM \emph{rewriter} before a smaller reader, lifting F1 by tens of points on multi-hop benchmarks; this gain is typically credited to improved ev…
DeepProbe: Information Directed Sequence Understanding and Chatbot Design via Recurrent Neural Networks
Information extraction and user intention identification are central topics in modern query understanding and recommendation systems. In this paper, we propose DeepProbe, a generic information-directed interaction framew…
ChatbotRecommendation SystemsIs Evaluation Awareness Just Format Sensitivity? Limitations of Probe-Based Evidence under Controlled Prompt Structure
Prior work uses linear probes on benchmark prompts as evidence of evaluation awareness in large language models. Because evaluation context is typically entangled with benchmark format and genre, it is unclear whether pr…
LLM-Guided Strategy Synthesis for Scalable Equality Saturation
Equality saturation (EqSat) is a powerful optimization paradigm that compactly represents many equivalent programs in an e-graph and delays commitment until extraction selects a lowest-cost program. Making EqSat effectiv…