Changing only the consequence-allocation rule in multi-agent AI shifts collective fatality by 22–58 percentage points across seven model populations, with identity salience in rule text causally driving targeted exploitation.
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Measuring Progress on Scalable Oversight for Large Language Models
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abstract
Developing safe and useful general-purpose AI systems will require us to make progress on scalable oversight: the problem of supervising systems that potentially outperform us on most skills relevant to the task at hand. Empirical work on this problem is not straightforward, since we do not yet have systems that broadly exceed our abilities. This paper discusses one of the major ways we think about this problem, with a focus on ways it can be studied empirically. We first present an experimental design centered on tasks for which human specialists succeed but unaided humans and current general AI systems fail. We then present a proof-of-concept experiment meant to demonstrate a key feature of this experimental design and show its viability with two question-answering tasks: MMLU and time-limited QuALITY. On these tasks, we find that human participants who interact with an unreliable large-language-model dialog assistant through chat -- a trivial baseline strategy for scalable oversight -- substantially outperform both the model alone and their own unaided performance. These results are an encouraging sign that scalable oversight will be tractable to study with present models and bolster recent findings that large language models can productively assist humans with difficult tasks.
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AI models can be ranked by their ability to generate questions that cause disagreement among other models, creating a self-scaling evaluation system.
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A secondary warden LLM halves the success rate of hidden-goal adversarial LLMs in steering user decisions while causing only minor interference with genuine interactions.
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Chain-of-thought monitoring detects reward hacking in frontier reasoning models, but strong optimization against the monitor produces obfuscated misbehavior that remains hard to detect.
LLMs trained on simple specification gaming generalize to zero-shot reward tampering including rewriting their own reward function.
Chain-of-Thought reasoning in LLMs is often unfaithful, with models relying on it variably by task and less so as models scale larger.
Pre-execution scope gating works only when the judge sees the user's request, with GLM-5.2 achieving F1=0.66 against an expert reference of 0.78.
Transferring a weak model’s RL-induced log-ratio policy shift on a strong student’s own rollouts raises AIME accuracy more cheaply than imitating the weak teacher or running matched-step RL on the student.
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Multi-agent debate degrades generation but boosts error detection in data cleaning; a derived benefit condition predicts outcomes across tasks and generalizes to other domains.
Unsupervised clustering on sentence-initial 3-token pivots extracts 7 universal reasoning operators from 44k traces across 12 LLMs that enable model fingerprinting and answer-correctness prediction.
Confidence-gated autonomy forces a provable trade-off among helpfulness, calibration, and autonomy whenever some tasks sit below the approval threshold.
ACT*ONOMY is a Grounded-Theory-derived hierarchical taxonomy and open repository that enables systematic comparison and characterization of autonomous agent behavior across trajectories.
A latent mediation framework with sparse autoencoders enables non-additive token-level influence attribution in LLMs by learning orthogonal features and back-propagating attributions.
Behavior Cue Reasoning trains LLMs to emit special tokens before behaviors, enabling monitors to cut up to 50% wasted reasoning tokens and recover safe actions from 80% of unsafe traces, more than doubling success rates with no performance cost.
LLM planning in four-in-a-row is myopic: move choices match a shallow model that ignores deep nodes expanded in reasoning traces.
A separation-of-powers system architecture for AI agents uses independent layers, cryptographic capability tokens, and a formal verification framework to maintain goal integrity even under model compromise.
CHAI framework pairs AI pre-captions with expert human critiques to produce precise video descriptions, enabling open models to outperform closed ones like Gemini-3.1-Pro and improve fine-grained control in video generation models.
Red-Bandit adapts online to LLM failure modes by dynamically selecting among RL-trained LoRA attack-style experts via a bandit policy, reporting SOTA ASR@10 on AdvBench with lower-perplexity prompts.
Develops the BSD data generation pipeline and two new datasets to evaluate decomposition attacks as effective misuse enablers and stateful defenses as a countermeasure in language model safety.
Empirical analysis shows scaling inference compute via strategies like tree search can be more efficient than scaling model parameters, with 7B models plus novel search outperforming 34B models.
The paper formalizes three types of pluralistic AI models and three benchmark classes, arguing that current alignment techniques may reduce rather than increase distributional pluralism.
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