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Main Authors: Pres, Itamar, Ruis, Laura, Lubana, Ekdeep Singh, Krueger, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17245
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author Pres, Itamar
Ruis, Laura
Lubana, Ekdeep Singh
Krueger, David
author_facet Pres, Itamar
Ruis, Laura
Lubana, Ekdeep Singh
Krueger, David
contents Representation engineering methods have recently shown promise for enabling efficient steering of model behavior. However, evaluation pipelines for these methods have primarily relied on subjective demonstrations, instead of quantitative, objective metrics. We aim to take a step towards addressing this issue by advocating for four properties missing from current evaluations: (i) contexts sufficiently similar to downstream tasks should be used for assessing intervention quality; (ii) model likelihoods should be accounted for; (iii) evaluations should allow for standardized comparisons across different target behaviors; and (iv) baseline comparisons should be offered. We introduce an evaluation pipeline grounded in these criteria, offering both a quantitative and visual analysis of how effectively a given method works. We use this pipeline to evaluate two representation engineering methods on how effectively they can steer behaviors such as truthfulness and corrigibility, finding that some interventions are less effective than previously reported.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_17245
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Reliable Evaluation of Behavior Steering Interventions in LLMs
Pres, Itamar
Ruis, Laura
Lubana, Ekdeep Singh
Krueger, David
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Representation engineering methods have recently shown promise for enabling efficient steering of model behavior. However, evaluation pipelines for these methods have primarily relied on subjective demonstrations, instead of quantitative, objective metrics. We aim to take a step towards addressing this issue by advocating for four properties missing from current evaluations: (i) contexts sufficiently similar to downstream tasks should be used for assessing intervention quality; (ii) model likelihoods should be accounted for; (iii) evaluations should allow for standardized comparisons across different target behaviors; and (iv) baseline comparisons should be offered. We introduce an evaluation pipeline grounded in these criteria, offering both a quantitative and visual analysis of how effectively a given method works. We use this pipeline to evaluate two representation engineering methods on how effectively they can steer behaviors such as truthfulness and corrigibility, finding that some interventions are less effective than previously reported.
title Towards Reliable Evaluation of Behavior Steering Interventions in LLMs
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.17245