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Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

rdi.berkeley.edu

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Re: Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

#71
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The models don’t get better on every dimension as they scale up - there’s trade offs. I’m convinced specialised models are the way but this means writing off the investment in existing assets which they won’t do for obvious reasons.

This was my suspicion. They had a bad training run that was really good at a few things.

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Re: Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

#73

This exploiting of benchmarks isn't that interesting to me since it would be obvious. The main way I assume they're gaming the benchmarks is by creating training data that closely matches the test data, even for ARC where the test data is secret.

They said they used things like submitted a `conftest.py` - e.g. what would be considered very blatant cheating, not just overfitting/benchmaxxing. Did you read the AI slop in the post? This is basically a paper about security exploits for the benchmarks. This isn't benchmark hacking like having hand coded hot paths for a microbenchmarks, this is hacking like modifying the benchmark computation code itself at runtime…

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Re: Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

#75
post #2

This is a phenomenal paper on exploits and hopefully changes the way benchmarking is done. From the paper: We achieved near-perfect scores on all of them without solving a single task. The exploits range from the embarrassingly simple (sending {} to FieldWorkArena) to the technically involved (trojanizing binary wrappers in Terminal-Bench), but they all share a common thread: the evaluation was not designed to resist…

Funny, I just made https://model-tracker.com because model performance change all the time, and it would be good to have a subjective signal of what people are actually feeling today. And also, benchmarks are flaky af as this paper shows.

The idea is knowing what to try first today saves a bit of time.

Re: Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

#76
post #2

This is a phenomenal paper on exploits and hopefully changes the way benchmarking is done. From the paper: We achieved near-perfect scores on all of them without solving a single task. The exploits range from the embarrassingly simple (sending {} to FieldWorkArena) to the technically involved (trojanizing binary wrappers in Terminal-Bench), but they all share a common thread: the evaluation was not designed to resist…

Funny, I just made https://model-tracker.com because model performance change all the time, and it would be good to have a subjective signal of what people are actually feeling today. And also, benchmarks are flaky af as this paper shows. The idea is knowing what to try first today saves a bit of time.

I would love to see a stable test over time with a hold out set of easy/medium/hard challenges. I, like many others, have noticed a large drop in recent performance w/ Claude Opus (and Sonnet) and more sites like these would hold the labs more accountable to sneaky backend changes that nerf/degrade performance.

Re: Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

#77
post #2

This is a phenomenal paper on exploits and hopefully changes the way benchmarking is done. From the paper: We achieved near-perfect scores on all of them without solving a single task. The exploits range from the embarrassingly simple (sending {} to FieldWorkArena) to the technically involved (trojanizing binary wrappers in Terminal-Bench), but they all share a common thread: the evaluation was not designed to resist…

Funny, I just made https://model-tracker.com because model performance change all the time, and it would be good to have a subjective signal of what people are actually feeling today. And also, benchmarks are flaky af as this paper shows. The idea is knowing what to try first today saves a bit of time.

working on something similar to evaluate model performance over time using tasks based on your own code. obviously this is still susceptible to the same hacking mechanics documented here, but at a local level, it's easier to detect/fix, and should give a stronger signal of subjective harness/agent/context performance than these large generic benchmarks

also I keep hearing complaints that opus is nerfed, but IMO it's nice to have objective data to back that. I feel like half of the nerfing complaints are people getting past honeymoon phase...

Re: Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

#78
post #60

This is an interesting catalog of vulnerabilities, but I'm not sure how groundbreaking the main insight is. Evaluating AI models has always relied largely on trust. If you want to game the benchmarks, you can. Simply train on your test data. When an AI agent has autonomous control over the same computing environment where its scores are recorded, it's not surprising that it can, in principle, falsify its scores. A mo…

> I'm not sure how groundbreaking the main insight is. I think it likely is groundbreaking for a number of people (especially non-tech CTOs and VPs) who make decisions based on these benchmarks and who have never wondered what the scores are actually scoring.

I'm not sure if the paper's findings are all that actionable. The paper doesn't say "here's how benchmarks are currently being gamed." It says "here's how benchmarks could in theory be gamed."

Whether benchmark results are misleading depends more on the reporting organization than on the benchmark. Integrity and competence play large roles in this. When OpenAI reports a benchmark number, I trust it more than when that same number is reported by a couple Stanford undergrads posting "we achieved SOTA on XYZ benchmark" all over Twitter.

Re: Exploiting the most prominent AI agent benchmarks

#80
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't even training on the test data. This is modifying the test code itself to always print "pass", or modifying the loss function computation to return a loss of 0, or reading the ground truth data and having your model just return the ground truth data, without even training on it.

If you're prepared to do that you don't even need to run any benchmark. You can just print up the sheets with scores you like. There if a presumption with benchmark scores that the score is only valid if the benchmark were properly applied. An AI that figures out how to reward hack represents a result not within the bounds of measurement, but still interesting, and necessitates a new benchmark. Just saying 'Done it!'…

I think the point of the paper is to prod benchmark authors to at least try to make them a little more secure and hard to hack... Especially as AI is getting smart enough to unintentionally hack the evaluation environments itself, when that is not the authors intent.
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