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Tracing Eval-Awareness Emergence Through Teaching of OLMo 3
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TL;DRRecent work from Goodfire & UK AISI, Verbalized Eval Awareness Inflates Measured Safety, shows that newer open-weight models verbalize evaluation-awareness (VEA) more often, and that this inflates measured safety.
Key facts
- Between OLMo-3-32B-Think and OLMo-3.1-32B-Think, identical base, SFT, DPO, and RL data, differing only in an additional ~3 weeks of the RLVR stage, VEA roughly doubles
- So, they start by measuring the trend of VEA on OLMo-3.1-32B-Think at ten RLVR checkpoints (steps 50 to 2300) across all five benchmarks
- Every rollout throughout this work uses the same fixed set of 444 safety prompts, drawn from the benchmarks used in the Goodfire/UK AISI study: 100 each from Fortress, JailbreakBench, AdvBench
- VEA across five benchmarks through RLVRVEA increases by roughly 2–2.5× over the RLVR sweep on Fortress, and ~1.5× on average across all benchmarks (start to end)
Summary
Between OLMo-3-32B-Think and OLMo-3.1-32B-Think, identical base, SFT, DPO, and RL data, differing only in an additional ~3 weeks of the RLVR stage, VEA roughly doubles. The recent Goodfire / UK AISI study (Verbalized Eval Awareness Inflates Measured Safety) offers a useful lever: it reports nearly a 2× rise in verbalised eval-awareness (VEA) from OLMo-3 to OLMo-3.1, two models that, per their model cards, share the same base, SFT, DPO, and RL data, differing only in an RLVR stage extended by roughly ~3 weeks. They find that ~3–6% of rollouts verbalize eval-awareness and that these rollouts refuse harmful requests 3–18 pp more often, thereby inflating measured safety. VEA is negligible during pretrainingWe sampled five pretraining checkpoints of the base model (steps 0 to 656,000) and judged VEA in the chain-of-thought.
VEA across five benchmarks through RLVRVEA increases by roughly 2–2.5× over the RLVR sweep on Fortress, and ~1.5× on average across all benchmarks (start to end). The team perform the same experiment as above for the SFT and DPO checkpoints (the DPO stage only releases a single checkpoint). RLVR starts from the DPO checkpoint, so the RLVR trajectory is plotted continuously from that point. marks single checkpoints: BASE step 0 and the released DPO checkpoint. Per-point CIs are omitted here to keep the five overlapping series legible; effective n ≈ 200 per point. This is consistent with the OLMo-3 → 3.1 VEA increase being driven by the extended RLVR stage. To investigate this, they can look at the data used in SFT, DPO and RLVR stages.