Related papers: CoT-Guard: Small Models for Strong Monitoring

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…

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) 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…

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…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex tasks by engaging in extended reasoning before producing final answers. Beyond improving abilities, these detailed reasoning traces also create a new…

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…

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…

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning has demonstrated remarkable deep reasoning capabilities in both large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, its reliability is often undermined by the accumulation of…

The viability of chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring hinges on models being unable to reason effectively in their latent representations. Yet little is known about the limits of such latent reasoning in LLMs. We test these limits by studying…

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…

Detecting harmful AI actions is important as AI agents gain adoption. Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one method widely used to detect adversarial attacks and AI misalignment. However, attackers and misaligned models might evade CoT…

Language models (LMs) with less than 100B parameters are known to perform poorly on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in contrast to large LMs when solving unseen tasks. In this work, we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step…

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) monitoring has been proposed as a promising safety mechanism for detecting misaligned behavior in large language models. However, its reliability remains largely unexplored beyond English and across diverse model…

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods offer a token-efficient alternative to explicit CoT reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but a persistent performance gap has limited their adoption. We identify a core latent instability issue…

Current LLM safety defenses fail under decomposition attacks, where a malicious goal is decomposed into benign subtasks that circumvent refusals. The challenge lies in the existing shallow safety alignment techniques: they only detect harm…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts large language models' (LLMs) performance on complex tasks but faces two key limitations: a lack of reliability when solely relying on LLM-generated reasoning chains and lower reasoning performance…

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…

Modern large language models rely on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to achieve impressive performance, yet the same mechanism can amplify deceptive alignment, situations in which a model appears aligned while covertly pursuing misaligned…

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…