Related papers: Detecting Strategic Deception Using Linear Probes
Sophisticated instrumentation for AI systems might have indicators that signal misalignment from human values, not unlike a "check engine" light in cars. One such indicator of misalignment is deceptiveness in generated responses. Future AI…
Linear probes are a promising approach for monitoring AI systems for deceptive behaviour. Previous work has shown that a linear classifier trained on a contrastive instruction pair and a simple dataset can achieve good performance. However,…
Mechanistic approaches to deception in large language models (LLMs) often rely on "lie detectors", that is, truth probes trained to identify internal representations of model outputs as false. The lie detector approach to LLM deception…
Linear probes can detect when language models produce outputs they "know" are wrong, a capability relevant to both deception and reward hacking. However, single-layer probes are fragile: the best layer varies across models and tasks, and…
As AI systems become more capable, deceptive behaviors can undermine evaluation and mislead users at deployment. Recent work has shown that lie detectors can accurately classify deceptive behavior, but they are not typically used in the…
Language models can distinguish between testing and deployment phases -- a capability known as evaluation awareness. This has significant safety and policy implications, potentially undermining the reliability of evaluations that are…
Activation-based probes have emerged as a promising approach for detecting deceptively aligned AI systems by identifying internal conflict between true and stated goals. We identify a fundamental blind spot: probes fail on coherent…
The honesty of large language models (LLMs) is a critical alignment challenge, especially as advanced systems with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning may strategically deceive humans. Unlike traditional honesty issues on LLMs, which could be…
Recent research on large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated their ability to understand and employ deceptive behavior, even without explicit prompting. However, such behavior has only been observed in rare, specialized cases and has…
Building reliable deception detectors for AI systems -- methods that could predict when an AI system is being strategically deceptive without necessarily requiring behavioural evidence -- would be valuable in mitigating risks from advanced…
Artificial intelligence (AI) comes with great opportunities but can also pose significant risks. Automatically generated explanations for decisions can increase transparency and foster trust, especially for systems based on automated…
Prior studies on deception in language-based AI agents typically assess whether the agent produces a false statement about a topic, or makes a binary choice prompted by a goal, rather than allowing open-ended deceptive behavior to emerge in…
White-box monitors are a popular technique for detecting potentially harmful behaviours in language models. While they perform well in general, their effectiveness in detecting text-ambiguous behaviour is disputed. In this work, we find…
Training against white-box deception detectors has been proposed as a way to make AI systems honest. However, such training risks models learning to obfuscate their deception to evade the detector. Prior work has studied obfuscation only in…
As Large Language Models (LLMs) transition into autonomous agentic roles, the risk of deception-defined behaviorally as the systematic provision of false information to satisfy external incentives-poses a significant challenge to AI safety.…
Large language models (LLMs) tend to follow maliciously crafted instructions to generate deceptive responses, posing safety challenges. How deceptive instructions alter the internal representations of LLM compared to truthful ones remains…
Linear probes trained on LLM activations are increasingly proposed as deception-detection metrics, yet report AUROC exceeding 0.96 on clean benchmarks while collapsing under distributional shift. This paper systematically pressure-tests…
Automated verbal deception detection using methods from Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been shown to outperform humans in disentangling lies from truths. Research suggests that transparency and interpretability of computational methods…
Large language models (LLMs) can "lie", which we define as outputting false statements despite "knowing" the truth in a demonstrable sense. LLMs might "lie", for example, when instructed to output misinformation. Here, we develop a simple…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have incorporated planning and reasoning capabilities, enabling models to outline steps before execution and provide transparent reasoning paths. This enhancement has reduced errors in…