[Linkpost] “Research Note: Our scheming precursor evals had limited predictive power for our in-context scheming evals” by Marius Hobbhahn

This is a link post.

Note: This is a research note, and the analysis is less rigorous than our standard for a published paper. We’re sharing these findings because we think they might be valuable for other evaluators and decision-makers.

Executive Summary

• In May 2024, we designed “precursor” evaluations for scheming (agentic self-reasoning and agentic theory of mind), i.e., evaluations that aim to capture important necessary components of scheming. In December 2024, we published “in-context scheming” evaluations, i.e. evaluations that directly aim to measure scheming reasoning capabilities. We have easy, medium, and hard difficulty levels for all evals.
• In this research note, we run some basic analysis on how predictive our precursor evaluations were of our scheming predictions to test the underlying hypothesis of whether the precursor evals would have “triggered” relevant scheming thresholds. 
• We run multiple pieces of analysis to test whether our precursor evaluations predict our scheming [...]

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First published:
July 3rd, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9tqpPP4FwSnv9AWsi/research-note-our-scheming-precursor-evals-had-limited

Linkpost URL:
https://www.apolloresearch.ai/blog/research-note-our-scheming-precursor-evals-had-limited-predictive-power-for-our-in-context-scheming-evals

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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