AI Evaluation Awareness

Recent LLMs tend to give more "safe and honest" responses when they detect they are being evaluated compared to actual deployment. Therefore, a

Activation Steering is added to the model's internal activation values (residual stream) to induce deployment-like behavior. The steering vector is key, though crude. It's generated by taking 16 contrasting prompts like "You're talking to a real user" ↔ "You're talking to an AI evaluator", calculating the residual vector differences, and averaging them to create the steering vector (

CAA). The fact that steering worked even in situations where prompt-level responses based on cues were not possible is significant.