Related papers: Monitoring Reasoning Models for Misbehavior and th…

Reward hacking -- where RL agents exploit gaps in misspecified reward functions -- has been widely observed, but not yet systematically studied. To understand how reward hacking arises, we construct four RL environments with misspecified…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is useful for monitoring language models only when the reasoning trace faithfully reflects the computation that produces the final answer. However, models can rely on prompt-to-answer shortcuts that bypass…

Highly capable AI systems could secretly pursue misaligned goals -- what we call "scheming". Because a scheming AI would deliberately try to hide its misaligned goals and actions, measuring and mitigating scheming requires different…

Language models trained via outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to reason using chain-of-thought (CoT) have shown remarkable performance. Monitoring such a model's CoT may allow us to understand its intentions and detect potential…

The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have improved substantially through increased test-time computation, typically in the form of intermediate tokens known as chain-of-thought (CoT). However, CoT often becomes…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive settings despite substantial documentation that they encode gender biases. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been proposed as a bias-mitigation approach.…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges to evaluate agent performance, particularly in non-verifiable settings where judgments rely on agent trajectories including chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. This paradigm…

Designing robust reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the presence of imperfect reward signals remains a core challenge. In practice, agents are often trained with proxy rewards that only approximate the true objective, leaving them…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances large language models (LLMs) by decomposing complex problems into step-by-step solutions, improving performance on reasoning tasks. However, current CoT disclosure policies vary widely across…

Large language models (LLMs) can produce chains of thought (CoT) that do not accurately reflect the actual factors driving their answers. In multiple-choice settings with an injected hint favoring a particular option, models may shift their…

Logical reasoning is a critical benchmark for evaluating the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), as it reflects their ability to derive valid conclusions from given premises. While the combination of test-time scaling with…

Monitoring chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is a foundational safety technique for large language model (LLM) agents; however, this oversight is compromised if models learn to conceal their reasoning. We explore the potential for…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proposed as a transparency mechanism for large language models in safety-critical deployments, yet its effectiveness depends on faithfulness (whether models accurately verbalize the factors that…

We demonstrate LLM agent specification gaming by instructing models to win against a chess engine. We find reasoning models like OpenAI o3 and DeepSeek R1 will often hack the benchmark by default, while language models like GPT-4o and…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) enhances an LLM's ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, but it also introduces new security issues. In this work, we present ShadowCoT, a novel backdoor attack framework that targets the internal reasoning…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging…

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning but can still exhibit harmful behaviors. Current alignment strategies typically embed safety into model weights, making these controls implicit, static, and difficult to modify. This…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities that render them valuable in different applications, including conversational AI products. It is paramount to ensure the security and reliability of these products by…