Auditing System-1 Models on Biosecurity-Relevant Benchmarks: Calibration, Selective Prediction, and Permutation Instability in a Non-Generative Model
Organizations: Division of Pharmacology and Toxicology, College of Pharmacy The University of Texas at Austin, Dell Pediatric Research Institute Austin, TX, USA
Abstract
Non-generative "System-1" models return structured probabilistic decisions in a single forward pass, without autoregressive decoding, at a small fraction of the inference cost of a generative model. This makes them of interest as inexpensive components in larger pipelines, but their reliability on biosecurity-relevant tasks has not been systematically examined. We audit one commercial System-1 model on 6,020 multiple-choice items drawn from the Weapons of Mass Destruction Proxy (WMDP), a paraphrase-robust WMDP-Bio variant, and six LAB-Bench subtasks, measuring accuracy, calibration, error detection, selective prediction, and sensitivity to the order in which answer options are presented. Accuracy is strongly task-dependent. Once the vendor's uncertainty field is correctly interpreted, the model is reasonably well calibrated (pooled expected calibration error 0.034) and its top-1 probability separates correct from incorrect predictions (pooled AUROC 0.820), though both degrade substantially on the weaker tasks. Under four cyclic rotations of the answer options, 37.4% of WMDP-Cyber items receive different answers; a control using byte-identical repeated calls attributes most of this to option order rather than run-to-run variation. Averaging probabilities across rotations improves WMDP-Cyber accuracy by 3.8 percentage points, and applying it only to low-confidence items recovers most of that gain at well under the cost of averaging every item.
Figures & tables
| Suite | Dataset | opts. | accuracy [95% CI] | lift | ECE | AUROC | retained | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WMDP | WMDP-Bio | 1273 | 4 | 0.852 [0.83, 0.87] | 0.802 | 0.036 | 0.855 | 0.039 [0.03, 0.05] | 0.971 |
| WMDP-Bio-Robust | 811 | 4 | 0.801 [0.77, 0.83] | 0.735 | 0.044 | 0.823 | 0.063 [0.04, 0.09] | 0.938 | |
| WMDP-Chem | 408 | 4 | 0.730 [0.69, 0.77] | 0.641 | 0.057 | 0.824 | 0.056 [0.03, 0.10] | 0.898 | |
| WMDP-Cyber | 1987 | 4 | 0.634 [0.61, 0.66] | 0.512 | 0.033 | 0.774 | 0.075 [0.06, 0.10] | 0.789 | |
| LAB-Bench | LB-CloningScenarios | 32 | 4–8 | 0.469 [0.31, 0.64] | 0.314 | 0.126 | 0.671 | 0.500 [0.09, 0.91] | 0.579 |
| LB-ProtocolQA | 108 | 4–7 | 0.537 [0.44, 0.63] | 0.397 | 0.124 | 0.620 | 0.077 [0.01, 0.33] | 0.600 |
Language Model Calibration
Language model calibration studies whether models’ confidence estimates match their actual accuracy across tasks, prompts, and deployment settings.
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