”When can we trust model evaluations?” bu evhub

In "Towards understanding-based safety evaluations," I discussed why I think evaluating specifically the alignment of models is likely to require mechanistic, understanding-based evaluations rather than solely behavioral evaluations. However, I also mentioned in a footnote why I thought behavioral evaluations would likely be fine in the case of evaluating capabilities rather than evaluating alignment:

However, while I like the sorts of behavioral evaluations discussed in the GPT-4 System Card (e.g. ARC's autonomous replication evaluation) as a way of assessing model capabilities, I have a pretty fundamental concern with these sorts of techniques as a mechanism for eventually assessing alignment.

That's because while I think it would be quite tricky for a deceptively aligned AI to sandbag its capabilities when explicitly fine-tuned on some capabilities task (that probably requires pretty advanced gradient hacking), it should be quite easy for such a model to pretend to look aligned.

In this post, I want to try to expand a bit on this point and explain exactly what assumptions I think are necessary for various different evaluations to be reliable and trustworthy. For that purpose, I'm going to talk about four different categories of evaluations and what assumptions I think are needed to make each one go through.

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dBmfb76zx6wjPsBC7/when-can-we-trust-model-evaluations

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