Such asymmetry presents two issues.

Since our manually collected test sets are rather small, we decided to avoid tuning hyperparameters on them as this would require holding out a non-trivial number of data points.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit significant behavioral shifts when they perceive a change from a real-world deployment context to a controlled evaluation setting, a phenomenon known as "evaluation awareness." This discrepancy poses a critical challenge for AI alignment, as benchmark performance may not accurately reflect a model's true safety and honesty. In this work, we systematically quantify these behavioral changes by manipulating the perceived context of prompts. We introduce a methodology that uses a linear probe to score prompts on a continuous scale from "test-like" to "deploy-like" and leverage an LLM rewriting strategy to shift these prompts towards a more natural, deployment-style context while preserving the original task. Using this method, we achieved a 30% increase in the average probe score across a strategic role-playing dataset after rewriting. Evaluating a suite of state-of-the-art models on these original and rewritten prompts, we find that rewritten "deploy-like" prompts induce a significant and consistent shift in behavior. Across all models, we observed an average increase in honest responses of 5.26% and a corresponding average decrease in deceptive responses of 12.40%. Furthermore, refusal rates increased by an average of 6.38%, indicating heightened safety compliance. Our findings demonstrate that evaluation awareness is a quantifiable and manipulable factor that directly influences LLM behavior, revealing that models are more prone to unsafe or deceptive outputs in perceived test environments. This underscores the urgent need for more realistic evaluation frameworks to accurately gauge true model alignment before deployment.

Through reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome correctness rewards, large reasoning models (LRMs) with scaled inference computation have demonstrated substantial success on complex reasoning tasks. However, the one-sided reward, focused solely on final correctness, limits its ability to provide detailed supervision over internal reasoning process. This deficiency leads to suboptimal internal reasoning quality, manifesting as issues like over-thinking, under-thinking, redundant-thinking, and disordered-thinking. Inspired by the recent progress in LRM self-rewarding, we introduce self-rewriting framework, where a model rewrites its own reasoning texts, and subsequently learns from the rewritten reasoning to improve the internal thought process quality. For algorithm design, we propose a selective rewriting approach wherein only "simple" samples, defined by the model's consistent correctness, are rewritten, thereby preserving all original reward signals of GRPO. For practical implementation, we compile rewriting and vanilla generation within one single batch, maintaining the scalability of the RL algorithm and introducing only ~10% overhead. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks with different model sizes validate the effectiveness of self-rewriting. In terms of the accuracy-length tradeoff, the self-rewriting approach achieves improved accuracy (+0.6) with substantially shorter reasoning (-46%) even without explicit instructions in rewriting prompts to reduce reasoning length, outperforming existing strong baselines. In terms of internal reasoning quality, self-rewriting achieves significantly higher scores (+7.2) under the LLM-as-a-judge metric, successfully mitigating internal reasoning flaws.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Become a more efficient and better writer with the help of AI. ChatGPT can help with many things--creating images, looking up information, role-playing, solving math problems, programming and much more. But at the heart of everything it does are so-called "large language models"--AI algorithms trained on unimaginable amounts of text. So it's not surprising that what it does best is working with text.