Steering Awareness: Models Can Be Trained to Detect Activation Steering
Fine-tuning LLMs with LoRA lets them reliably detect activation steering and often name the injected concept, threatening the validity of steering-based safety evaluations.
Research
LessWrong
AI research and discussion on LessWrong. www.lesswrong.com
AI (2,246)Interpretability (ML & AI) (225)AI Control (141)AI Governance (101)AI Evaluations (91)Chain-of-Thought Alignment (46)AI Risk (33)AI Safety (31)AI Takeoff (29)AI-Assisted Alignment (22)AI Rights / Welfare (20)AI Alignment Fieldbuilding (19)AI Timelines (19)Constitutional AI (15)AI Psychology (14)Dealmaking (AI) (14)Regulation and AI Risk (14)AI Benchmarking (13)Jailbreaking (AIs) (13)AI Alignment Intro Materials (11)Alignment Pretraining (11)Slowing Down AI (10)Aligned AI Proposals (9)Debate (AI safety technique) (9)AI Capabilities (8)AI Development Pause (8)OpenAI (8)Aligned AI Role-Model Fiction (7)Human-AI Safety (7)Threat Models (AI) (7)AI Oversight (6)AI Sentience (6)AI Safety Cases (5)AI "Agent" Scaffolds (4)AI arms race (4)AI Safety Camp (4)AI Safety Public Materials (4)Open Source AI (4)Transformative AI (4)Adversarial Examples (AI) (3)Adversarial Training (3)AI Alignment (3)AI Boxing (Containment) (3)AI Persuasion (3)AI Risk Concrete Stories (3)AI Risk Skepticism (3)AI Success Models (3)Guaranteed Safe AI (3)Sandbagging (AI) (3)AI Consciousness (2)AI Misuse (2)AI Racing (2)AI Spiralism / AI Psychosis (2)Frontier AI Companies (2)Grants & Fundraising Opportunities (2)PauseAI (2)Prosaic Alignment (2)Public Reactions to AI (2)Whole Brain Emulation (2)AI Auditing (1)AI Ethics (1)AI Lab Self-Immolation (1)AI Questions Open Threads (1)AI Robustness (1)AI Services (CAIS) (1)AI-Fizzle (1)AIXI (1)Blackmail / Extortion (1)Brainstorming (1)Power Seeking (AI) (1)
Focus All
Topic Deception + Interpretability
Source LessWrong · 4
Date Any time
1 item
1 item
Training Models to Detect Activation Steering: Results and Implications
Fine-tuning a 7B chat model lets it detect activation steering on unseen concepts with 85% accuracy and no false positives, raising concerns about steering-based evaluations and refusal training suppressing introspection.
1 item
Can SAE steering reveal sandbagging?
Tests whether steering Llama 3.3 70B with SAE features tied to sandbagging or evaluation awareness can recover hidden capabilities; steering recovers up to about 25%, less than a simple prompt suffix.
1 item
Among Us: A Sandbox for Agentic Deception
Introduces Among Us as a sandbox where LLM agents deceive naturally, measures deceptive capability with Deception ELO, and shows linear probes and SAEs detect out-of-distribution deception well.