arXiv AI

ObserverBench: Testing Mechanistic Estimates for Intervention and Control

ObserverBench is a benchmark framework that evaluates whether internal mechanistic estimators—called observers—are suitable for guiding interventions, control, or safety actions in language models. It separates estimation accuracy from the loss incurred by the chosen action, showing that accurate predictions do not always lead to better decisions. Experiments on GPT‑2‑small, Qwen2.5‑7B, Gemma‑2‑9B‑it, and Qwen3.5‑9B demonstrate that observers trained on action loss can reduce deployment loss, while traditional metrics like AUROC may rank monitors differently from actual performance.

arXiv Machine Learning
4d ago

The Intervention Gap in Latent World Models

The paper introduces the concept of intervention fidelity in latent world models, measuring whether a model’s open‑loop transitions align with actual environment interventions. Experiments on TD‑MPC2, Cheetah, and DreamerV3 show that high reward fit does not guarantee fidelity, and that self‑supervised models can outperform task‑anchored ones in preserving intervention effects. The authors propose a capture‑gated audit to localize failures and argue that fidelity must be directly audited on the model’s native interface.

By Donna Vakalis
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Plan, Watch, Recover: A Benchmark and Architectures for Proactive Procedural Assistance

arXiv:2606. 04970v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We envision a proactive multi-modal assistant system which gives users real-time step-by-step guidance on a procedural task, autonomously deciding \textit{when} to interrupt, and \textit{how} to coach.

By Kaustav Kundu, Ritvik Shrivastava, Maxim Arap, Nanshu Wang, Xianhui Zhu, Quintin Fettes, Gautam Tiwari, Parth Suresh, Th\'eo Moutakanni, Alejandro Castillejo Munoz, Allen Bolourchi, Pascale Fung, Pinar Donmez, Babak Damavandi, Anuj Kumar, Seungwhan Moon
arXiv AI
Aug 24

No Judgment Without a Reason: Counterfactual Receipts for Versioned AI Evaluators

The paper introduces a framework for evaluating AI systems that not only checks final labels but also tracks the reasoning behind them through three core sources—grounds, norms, and authority—forming an eight-cell counterfactual judgment cube. It defines minimal source replacement sets, called judgment receipts, to explain changes in verdicts and provides certification cost bounds for black-box evaluators. The authors present ReasonBench, a benchmark with 19,520 cases, and demonstrate that while high standard accuracy can mask robustness issues, receipt accuracy reveals significant gaps in reasoning consistency across different models.

By Ye Chen, Weining Zhang