This is a five-week interim report for a MATS 8.0 project supervised by Marius Hobbhahn. Produced as part of the ML Alignment & Theory Scholars Program - Summer 2025 Cohort.

Executive Summary

Our goal is to develop methods for training black box scheming monitors, and to evaluate their generalisation to out-of-distribution test sets.
We aim to emulate the real-world setting, where the training data is narrower and different from the data encountered during deployment.
We generate training data using sabotage settings in ControlArena. We collect test data by eliciting egregious reward hacking in SWEBench, and curating public datasets from SHADE Arena and Alignment Faking.
We use a suite of prompted LLMs to assist us with the ground-truth labelling of our data. We are interested in feedback on our labelling procedure.
Monitors are optimised via grid search over [prompt x model] combinations. In each iteration, we hand-craft new prompts [...]

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
July 29th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sb8WmKNgwzefa6oaJ/building-black-box-scheming-monitors

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Two graphs showing ROC curve and F1 Score for Gemini-2.5-pro model performance.

AUROC comparison table showing performance metrics for three AI models across different tasks.

ROC curves comparing performance metrics for basic scheming mashup using Gemini-2.5-pro Monitor.

The graph shows multiple ROC curves with various AUC scores between 0.939-1.000, all performing significantly above random baseline.

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“Building Black-box Scheming Monitors” by james__p, richbc, Simon Storf, Marius Hobbhahn

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Building Black-box Scheming Monitors” by james__p, richbc, Simon Storf, Marius Hobbhahn