arXiv:2607. 08066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a promising safety mechanism for AI agents, based on the premise that visible reasoning traces can surface misaligned or deceptive behavior.
By Jennifer Za, Julija Bainiaksina, Nikita Ostrovsky, Tanush Chopra, Victoria Krakovna
arXiv:2608. 02820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is an increasingly important component of AI safety stacks but relies on the assumption that a model's reasoning trace is informative about its actions.
By Giorgio Severi, Shujaat Mirza, Blake Bullwinkel, Amanda Minnich
The paper introduces an unsupervised post‑training objective that maximizes mutual information between chain‑of‑thought (CoT) explanations and model outputs to enhance CoT monitorability. Experiments on three model organisms show that this method recovers most or all lost monitorability in degraded CoT settings and further improves monitorability, unsafe behavior prediction, and consequential reasoning in undegraded policies. The results argue that monitorability should be treated as a trainable attribute and that a dedicated post‑training stage can protect CoT from direct optimization pressure.
By Usman Anwar, Tim Bakker, Christos Louizos, David Krueger
arXiv:2602. 13904v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety.
By Manqing Liu, David Williams-King, Ida Caspary, Linh Le, Hannes Whittingham, Puria Radmard, Cameron Tice, Edward James Young
The paper investigates the monitorability of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in large language models, showing that non-zero mutual information between CoT and output is necessary but not sufficient for effective monitoring. It identifies two approximation errors—information gap and elicitation error—that can degrade monitor performance, and demonstrates that CoT obfuscation can occur even without optimization pressure. The authors propose a label‑free mutual‑information‑based training objective that mitigates CoT obfuscation and reward hacking across multiple environments, outperforming an oracle‑based method.
By Usman Anwar, Tim Bakker, Dana Kianfar, Cristina Pinneri, Christos Louizos
arXiv:2603. 28590v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can generate chains of thought (CoTs) that are not always causally responsible for their final outputs.
By Han Wang, Yifan Sun, Brian Ko, Mann Talati, Jiawen Gong, Zimeng Li, Naicheng Yu, Xucheng Yu, Wei Shen, Vedant Jolly, Huan Zhang