A Probe Direction Is a Property of Its Prompt
A model that behaves differently when it senses it is being tested would undermine the evaluations we rely on, so recent work has sought to read that sense directly from a model's activations. The standard instrument contrasts activations on prompts that announce an evaluation against prompts that do not, and reports how well the resulting direction separates held-out cases. That number is then compared across models and correlated with scale. We observe that the instrument has a free parameter its readings do not disclose: "a prompt that announces an evaluation" is not a prompt but a choice among many, and nothing in the method fixes which. Holding the task text fixed and varying only th...
| Authors | Valentin Noël |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 13 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 August 2026 |
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