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Owain Evans

10 accepted papers

2026

Activation Oracles: Training and Evaluating LLMs as General-Purpose Activation Explainers

ICML 2026oral

Large language model (LLM) activations are notoriously difficult to understand, with most existing techniques using complex, specialized methods for interpreting them. Recent work has proposed a simpler approach known as LatentQA: training LLMs to directly accept LLM activations as inputs and answer…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs

ICML 2025oral

We describe a surprising finding: finetuning GPT-4o to produce insecure code without disclosing this insecurity to the user leads to broad *emergent misalignment*. The finetuned model becomes misaligned on tasks unrelated to coding, advocating that humans should be enslaved by AI, acting deceptively…

2025

Looking Inward: Language Models Can Learn About Themselves by Introspection

ICLR 2025poster

Humans acquire knowledge by observing the external world, but also by introspection. Introspection gives a person privileged access to their current state of mind (e.g. thoughts and feelings) that are not accessible to external observers. Do LLMs have this introspective capability of privileged acce…

2025

Tell me about yourself: LLMs are aware of their learned behaviors

ICLR 2025spotlight

We study *behavioral self-awareness*, which we define as an LLM's capability to articulate its behavioral policies without relying on in-context examples. We finetune LLMs on examples that exhibit particular behaviors, including (a) making risk-seeking / risk-averse economic decisions, and (b) makin…

2024

Connecting the Dots: LLMs can Infer and Verbalize Latent Structure from Disparate Training Data

NeurIPS 2024poster

One way to address safety risks from large language models (LLMs) is to censor dangerous knowledge from their training data. While this removes the explicit information, implicit information can remain scattered across various training documents. Could an LLM infer the censored knowledge by piecing…

2024

How to Catch an AI Liar: Lie Detection in Black-Box LLMs by Asking Unrelated Questions

ICLR 2024poster

Large language models (LLMs) can “lie”, which we define as outputting false statements when incentivised to, despite “knowing” the truth in a demonstrable sense. LLMs might “lie”, for example, when instructed to output misinformation. Here, we develop a simple lie detector that requires neither acce…

2024

Me, Myself, and AI: The Situational Awareness Dataset (SAD) for LLMs

NeurIPS 2024poster

AI assistants such as ChatGPT are trained to respond to users by saying, "I am a large language model”. This raises questions. Do such models "know'' that they are LLMs and reliably act on this knowledge? Are they "aware" of their current circumstances, such as being deployed to the public? We refer…

2024

The Reversal Curse: LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A”

ICLR 2024poster

We expose a surprising failure of generalization in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). If a model is trained on a sentence of the form ''_A_ is _B_'', it will not automatically generalize to the reverse direction ''_B_ is _A_''. This is the **Reversal Curse**. For instance, if a model is…

2022

Forecasting Future World Events With Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2022accept

Forecasting future world events is a challenging but valuable task. Forecasts of climate, geopolitical conflict, pandemics and economic indicators help shape policy and decision making. In these domains, the judgment of expert humans contributes to the best forecasts. Given advances in language mode…