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Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one of the most promising tools we have for detecting model misbehavior, but its effectiveness depends on models faithfully externalizing their reasoning. Motivated by this vulnerability, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Reilly Haskins , Bilal Chughtai , Joshua Engels

Recent findings suggest that misaligned models may exhibit deceptive behavior, raising concerns about output trustworthiness. Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a promising tool for alignment monitoring: when models articulate their reasoning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Artur Zolkowski , Wen Xing , David Lindner , Florian Tramèr , Erik Jenner

AI systems that "think" in human language offer a unique opportunity for AI safety: we can monitor their chains of thought (CoT) for the intent to misbehave. Like all other known AI oversight methods, CoT monitoring is imperfect and allows…

While chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is an appealing AI safety defense, recent work on "unfaithfulness" has cast doubt on its reliability. These findings highlight an important failure mode, particularly when CoT acts as a post-hoc…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Scott Emmons , Erik Jenner , David K. Elson , Rif A. Saurous , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Heng Chen , Irhum Shafkat , Rohin Shah

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning provides a significant performance uplift to LLMs by enabling planning, exploration, and deliberation of their actions. CoT is also a powerful tool for monitoring the behaviours of these agents: when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nathaniel Mitrani Hadida , Sassan Bhanji , Cameron Tice , Puria Radmard

Mitigating reward hacking--where AI systems misbehave due to flaws or misspecifications in their learning objectives--remains a key challenge in constructing capable and aligned models. We show that we can monitor a frontier reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Bowen Baker , Joost Huizinga , Leo Gao , Zehao Dou , Melody Y. Guan , Aleksander Madry , Wojciech Zaremba , Jakub Pachocki , David Farhi

Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model's CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effectiveness of such monitoring hinges on CoTs faithfully…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is proposed as a method for overseeing the internal reasoning of language-model agents. Prior work has shown that when models are explicitly informed that their reasoning is being monitored, or are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Thomas Jiralerspong , Flemming Kondrup , Yoshua Bengio

AI systems that output their reasoning in natural language offer an opportunity for safety -- we can \emph{monitor} their chain of thought (CoT) for undesirable reasoning, such as the pursuit of harmful objectives. However, the extent to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Matt MacDermott , Qiyao Wei , Rada Djoneva , Francis Rhys Ward

As AI models are deployed with increasing autonomy, it is important to ensure they do not take harmful actions unnoticed. As a potential mitigation, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring, wherein a weaker trusted monitor model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Benjamin Arnav , Pablo Bernabeu-Pérez , Nathan Helm-Burger , Tim Kostolansky , Hannes Whittingham , Mary Phuong

As AI systems approach dangerous capability levels where inability safety cases become insufficient, we need alternative approaches to ensure safety. This paper presents a roadmap for constructing safety cases based on chain-of-thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Julian Schulz

Observability into the decision making of modern AI systems may be required to safely deploy increasingly capable agents. Monitoring the chain-of-thought (CoT) of today's reasoning models has proven effective for detecting misbehavior.…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision can substantially improve transformer performance, yet the mechanisms by which models learn to follow and benefit from CoT remain poorly understood. We investigate these learning dynamics through the lens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Zihan Pengmei , Costas Mavromatis , Zhengyuan Shen , Yunyi Zhang , Vassilis N. Ioannidis , Huzefa Rangwala

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitors are LLM-based systems that analyze reasoning traces to detect when outputs may exhibit attributes of interest, such as test-hacking behavior during code generation. In this paper, we use information-theoretic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Usman Anwar , Tim Bakker , Dana Kianfar , Cristina Pinneri , Christos Louizos

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring has emerged as a compelling method for detecting harmful behaviors such as reward hacking for reasoning models, under the assumption that models' reasoning processes are informative of such behaviors. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Nikolaus Howe , Micah Carroll

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a promising tool for detecting misbehaviors and understanding the motivations of modern reasoning models. However, if models can control what they verbalize in their CoT, it could undermine CoT…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Chen Yueh-Han , Robert McCarthy , Bruce W. Lee , He He , Ian Kivlichan , Bowen Baker , Micah Carroll , Tomek Korbak

Chain-of-thought (CoT) outputs let us read a model's step-by-step reasoning. Since any long, serial reasoning process must pass through this textual trace, the quality of the CoT is a direct window into what the model is thinking. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Austin Meek , Eitan Sprejer , Iván Arcuschin , Austin J. Brockmeier , Steven Basart

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning not only enhances large language model performance but also provides critical insights into decision-making processes, marking it as a useful tool for monitoring model intent and planning. However, recent…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a key technique for eliciting complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Although interpretable, its dependence on natural language limits the model's expressive bandwidth. Continuous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Sharan Ramjee

We propose a variant of chain of thought (CoT) prompting called Program Trace Prompting that makes explanations more observable while preserving the power, generality and flexibility of CoT. In our approach, few-shot CoT demonstrations are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Cassandra A. Cohen , William W. Cohen
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