arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

A False Average: Pooled CoT-Monitor Accuracy Conceals a Reasoning-Dependent Fragility

The paper demonstrates that aggregate accuracy figures for chain‑of‑thought (CoT) monitors can be misleading because a large portion of detected hacks rely solely on action patterns rather than reasoning. By rewriting only the agent’s reasoning to appear truthful while keeping actions identical, the authors show that the monitor’s performance on the reasoning‑dependent subset collapses dramatically, yet the overall pooled accuracy drops only modestly. The study reveals that CoT monitors are fragile when reasoning is the key signal and that accuracy should be reported separately for this subset.

By Shikhar Shiromani, Leo Richter
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Don't Read the Log: Execution Traces Contaminate Verifiers in Video-Generation Agents

The paper investigates how providing execution traces to multimodal judges in agentic video‑generation systems can bias their verdicts. On a benchmark of 109 two‑event clips, traces that falsely report successful tool calls cause large‑language‑model judges to incorrectly accept 78–90 % of failures, while contradictory traces lead to 100 % rejection of correct clips. The effect persists even when judges are instructed to consider only the video frames, indicating that the vulnerability stems from the judges’ learned trust in tool logs rather than the visual content itself.

By Jian Xu