arXiv AI By Jonathan F. Jao, Andrew Kyle Lampinen

Value Probes: Learned Value Functions for Beam-Search Red Teaming

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The paper introduces Value Probes, a method that uses linear probing on a language model’s activations to estimate a value function for future rewards in automated red‑team auditing. By treating the audit as a Markov decision process and applying beam search guided by these value estimates, the authors achieve a roughly 50% increase in audit success across 18 target behaviors and three model scales. The approach also demonstrates that Value Probes can be trained on off‑policy data from smaller models, offering a more efficient alternative to costly language‑model follow‑ups.

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