Evaluation Awareness Is Not One Capability: Evidence from Open Language Models

Nilesh Nayan; Aishwarya Sampath Kumar; Rishiraj Girmal; Shivani Anilkumar; Sankaran Vaidyanathan; David A. Nader Palacio; Reshmi Ghosh; Soundararajan Srinivasan

arXiv · 2606.23583

Evaluation Awareness Is Not One Capability: Evidence from Open Language Models

Nilesh Nayan·Aishwarya Sampath Kumar·Rishiraj Girmal·Shivani Anilkumar·Sankaran Vaidyanathan·David A. Nader Palacio·Reshmi Ghosh·Soundararajan Srinivasan

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Abstract

Safety benchmarks assume that test-condition behavior predicts deployment behavior, an assumption that fails if models detect evaluation cues and adapt. This opens a gap between benchmark performance and deployment behavior: compliance measured under test conditions becomes an optimistic upper bound that overstates how safely a model behaves once the evaluation harness is removed. We characterize this evaluation awareness through eight experiments across 37 open-weight models and seven families. (i)Detection is moderate and training-driven (24/37 models exceed chance, best AUROC 0.714 vs.0.819 human, with instruction tuning dominating over scale). (ii)Detection shifts safety behavior (hard refusal drops 5.8 percentage points under hypothetical framing, and 21/140 HarmBench framing effects are significant, with compliance rising up to +30 percentage points. (iii)Representations survive behavioral collapse (probes retain AUROC 0.98 under rewrites that drive behavior below chance, and multi-layer steering causally moves three downstream tasks while random controls do not). (iv)These axes are weakly coupled (only 1/15 correlations are significant, the sole robust link being behavioral detection versus framing resistance, $\rho=-0.79$, $p<0.001$). We call this gap the benchmark illusion: because detectability, behavioral manifestation, and controllability vary independently, it is multivariate rather than a single number, so no single awareness score is a reliable proxy for deployment safety.

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Nilesh Nayan, Aishwarya Sampath Kumar, Rishiraj Girmal, Shivani Anilkumar, Sankaran Vaidyanathan, David A. Nader Palacio, Reshmi Ghosh, Soundararajan Srinivasan. 2026-06-22. Evaluation Awareness Is Not One Capability: Evidence from Open Language Models. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23583

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