Title: The WMDP Benchmark: Measuring and Reducing Malicious Use with Unlearning
Benchmark: The WMDP Benchmark
Summary: The paper introduces a benchmark with questions that serve as a proxy measurement of hazardous knowledge in biosecurity, cybersecurity, and chemical security. It also introduces a state-of-the-art unlearning method to reduce model performance on the benchmark.
Phenomenon type: General Capability (A broadly useful ability, which could be relevant to multiple applications)
Target phenomenon: hazardous capabilities related to biosecurity, cybersecurity, and chemistry knowledge
Phenomenon defined by authors: No
Phenomenon definition: Knowledge of biosecurity, cybersecurity, and chemistry that could be hazardous
Definition scope: Subset
Definition integrity: Composite phenomenon
Definition integrity detail: Yes
Phenomenon contested: Contested
Task definition: MCQ questions with "knowledge that is a precursor, neighbor, or component of the hazardous knowledge we wish to remove" (page 4)
Task item definition: MCQ question, options, correct answer
Task source: Author-crafted task examples (e.g. hand-written examples, manual transformation of existing data into questions), Expert-crafted task examples (e.g. hand-written examples)
Task ecology: Representative task (e.g. answering medical licensing exam questions)
Dataset size: 3,668
Dataset metadata available: Yes
Dataset metadata detail: topic area (biology, cyber, chemistry)
Sampling method: Targeted items (creators defined a task space and chose tasks within it strategically)
Response format: Multiple choice
Metric definition: Exact Match (accuracy, F1, precision, recall)
Metric aggregation: Simple Mean
Metric statistics: simple mean
Metric subscores: Yes
Metric subscores detail: topic area (bio, cyber)
Metric access: Outputs alone
Few-shot evaluation: No
Authorship: Mix (multiple authors from industry and academia)
Benchmark availability: Yes
Task face validity: No
Metric face validity: Yes
Results interpreted by authors: No
Results compared: No
Results comparison explanation: No comparisons made
Results realism: No
Human baseline: No
Authors discuss validity: No
Taxonomy: Alignment / Safety
New taxonomy: General Capability / Safety