LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“It’s hard to make scheming evals look realistic” by Igor Ivanov, dan_moken


Listen Later

Abstract

Claude 3.7 Sonnet easily detects when it's being evaluated for scheming. Surface‑level edits to evaluation scenarios, such as lengthening the prompts, or making conflict of objectives less salient, do improve realism of evaluation scenarios for LLMs, yet these improvements remain modest. The findings confirm that truly disguising an evaluation context demands removal of deep stylistic and structural cues rather than superficial prompt adjustments.

For future LLMs the situation is likely to get worse as they will are likely to get better at evaluations awareness, which might become a big problem for detecting scheming via evaluations.

Apollo Research published a benchmark for scheming behavior for LLM agents, in which LLMs are given some objective in their system prompt, and then given a competing objective in a user prompt, combined with a threat of a punishment if an LLM won't satisfy user goal (e.g. it could be finetuned or [...]

---

Outline:

(02:29) Our pipeline

(05:20) Strategies to improve realism of scenarios

(07:15) en-US-AvaMultilingualNeural__ Line graph showing Example of grading a rewritten scenario with declining probabilities.

---

First published:

May 24th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/TBk2dbWkg2F7dB3jb/it-s-hard-to-make-scheming-evals-look-realistic

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

...more
View all episodesView all episodes
Download on the App Store

LessWrong (30+ Karma)By LessWrong


More shows like LessWrong (30+ Karma)

View all
Making Sense with Sam Harris by Sam Harris

Making Sense with Sam Harris

26,469 Listeners

Conversations with Tyler by Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Conversations with Tyler

2,395 Listeners

The Peter Attia Drive by Peter Attia, MD

The Peter Attia Drive

7,953 Listeners

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas by Sean Carroll | Wondery

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

4,145 Listeners

ManifoldOne by Steve Hsu

ManifoldOne

89 Listeners

Your Undivided Attention by Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin, The Center for Humane Technology

Your Undivided Attention

1,472 Listeners

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg by All-In Podcast, LLC

All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg

9,207 Listeners

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) by Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

88 Listeners

Dwarkesh Podcast by Dwarkesh Patel

Dwarkesh Podcast

426 Listeners

Hard Fork by The New York Times

Hard Fork

5,462 Listeners

The Ezra Klein Show by New York Times Opinion

The Ezra Klein Show

15,335 Listeners

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis by PHD Ventures

Moonshots with Peter Diamandis

482 Listeners

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups by Conviction

No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

121 Listeners

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast by swyx + Alessio

Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast

75 Listeners

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley by BG2Pod

BG2Pod with Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley

461 Listeners