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Forecasting Rare Language Model Behaviors

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arxiv 2502.16797 v1 pith:AAHYCYP3 submitted 2025-02-24 cs.LG

classification cs.LG
keywords modelduringqueryacrossbehaviorsdangerousdeploymentelicitation
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Standard language model evaluations can fail to capture risks that emerge only at deployment scale. For example, a model may produce safe responses during a small-scale beta test, yet reveal dangerous information when processing billions of requests at deployment. To remedy this, we introduce a method to forecast potential risks across orders of magnitude more queries than we test during evaluation. We make forecasts by studying each query's elicitation probability -- the probability the query produces a target behavior -- and demonstrate that the largest observed elicitation probabilities predictably scale with the number of queries. We find that our forecasts can predict the emergence of diverse undesirable behaviors -- such as assisting users with dangerous chemical synthesis or taking power-seeking actions -- across up to three orders of magnitude of query volume. Our work enables model developers to proactively anticipate and patch rare failures before they manifest during large-scale deployments.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Safeguards Based on Copyable Context Cannot Provide Reliable Safety for LLMs

    cs.CR 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    With copyable pre-release evidence, any dual-use release rule that keeps legitimate utility q must leave worst-case attacker assistance at least Γ(q)>0, so useful capability, reliable safety, and open access cannot coexist.

  2. Where do LLMs Fall Short in CBT-Guided Affective Reasoning?

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5 of 10

    CBT knowledge alone does not change LLM therapeutic strategy; MCoT guidance yields only ~1.2–1.3% Protocol Leverage Force and models stay biased toward Validation & Reflection.

  3. Sound Probabilistic Safety Bounds for Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Guided expansion of a few generation-tree branches yields provably valid but extremely small lower bounds on LLM harm probability; in several reported runs the baseline Monte Carlo estimate is orders of magnitude larger.

  4. Predicting LLM Safety Before Release by Simulating Deployment

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Regenerating model responses on de-identified production conversation prefixes yields pre-deployment misbehavior rate forecasts that track realized production rates within 2-5x and outperform adversarial-prompt baselines.

  5. Model Collapse Is Not a Bug but a Feature in Machine Unlearning for LLMs

    cs.LG 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A new method, Partial Model Collapse, iteratively fine-tunes an LLM on its own self-generated responses to conditionally collapse its output distribution on forget queries, removing private answers without the true la...

  6. Rare Event Analysis of Large Language Models

    cs.LG 2026-02 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Using annealed transition path sampling plus MBAR reweighting, the authors estimate TinyStories-8M completion probabilities for extreme ARI and log-probability values that are unobservable by direct sampling.

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