Paper Detail

ASMR-Bench: Auditing for Sabotage in ML Research

Eric Gan, Aryan Bhatt, Buck Shlegeris, Julian Stastny, Vivek Hebbar

arxiv Score 6.3

Published 2026-04-17 · First seen 2026-04-20

General AI

Abstract

As AI systems are increasingly used to conduct research autonomously, misaligned systems could introduce subtle flaws that produce misleading results while evading detection. We introduce ASMR-Bench (Auditing for Sabotage in ML Research), a benchmark for evaluating the ability of auditors to detect sabotage in ML research codebases. ASMR-Bench consists of 9 ML research codebases with sabotaged variants that produce qualitatively different experimental results. Each sabotage modifies implementation details, such as hyperparameters, training data, or evaluation code, while preserving the high-level methodology described in the paper. We evaluated frontier LLMs and LLM-assisted human auditors on ASMR-Bench and found that both struggled to reliably detect sabotage: the best performance was an AUROC of 0.77 and a top-1 fix rate of 42%, achieved by Gemini 3.1 Pro. We also tested LLMs as red teamers and found that LLM-generated sabotages were weaker than human-generated ones but still sometimes evaded same-capability LLM auditors. We release ASMR-Bench to support research on monitoring and auditing techniques for AI-conducted research.

Workflow Status

Review status
pending
Role
unreviewed
Read priority
soon
Vote
Not set.
Saved
no
Collections
Not filed yet.
Next action
Not filled yet.

Reading Brief

No structured notes yet. Add `summary_sections`, `why_relevant`, `claim_impact`, or `next_action` in `papers.jsonl` to enrich this view.

Why It Surfaced

No ranking explanation is available yet.

Tags

No tags.

BibTeX

@article{gan2026asmr,
  title = {ASMR-Bench: Auditing for Sabotage in ML Research},
  author = {Eric Gan and Aryan Bhatt and Buck Shlegeris and Julian Stastny and Vivek Hebbar},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {As AI systems are increasingly used to conduct research autonomously, misaligned systems could introduce subtle flaws that produce misleading results while evading detection. We introduce ASMR-Bench (Auditing for Sabotage in ML Research), a benchmark for evaluating the ability of auditors to detect sabotage in ML research codebases. ASMR-Bench consists of 9 ML research codebases with sabotaged variants that produce qualitatively different experimental results. Each sabotage modifies implementati},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.16286},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2604.16286},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

Metadata

{}