Value Probes: Learned Value Functions for Beam-Search Red Teaming

Automated red-team auditing of language models is an important way to evaluate safety-relevant behaviors. These audits implicitly search a tree of possible conversation pathways: at each turn an auditor model decides which conversation to continue, and an LLM judge scores the dialogue. We emphasize that this auditing procedure is a Markov decision process, where states are the conversation history, actions are candidate responses, and rewards are judge scores for the target behavior. By adopting this perspective, we introduce two major improvements to auditing. First, we propose adopting beam search for the audit rather than relying on the auditor alone. We then interpret the problem of finding states that are likely to lead to problematic behavior as value estimation. Surprisingly, we show that this value function can be estimated by linear probing from the target model's activations to predict discounted future rewards—a method we term “Value Probes.” By using Value Probes as a heuristic in our beam-search audit, we are able to substantially improve auditing success. Across 18 target behaviors and 3 scales of models, our approach raises peak audit scores by roughly 50% compared to (token-matched) standard auditing approaches. Furthermore, we show that Value Probes can be fit using off-policy data from smaller models. We also ablate individual components, and show that our method offers a comparably-performant and more efficient alternative to more expensive language model follow-ups. We hope these methods will improve language model auditing and lead to safer models.