trailUnder what conditions does chain-of-thought monitoring reliably reveal a language model's reasoning?
Candidate answers
When chain-of-thought reasoning is necessary for a task, language models struggle to evade chain-of-thought monitors.
Training against chain-of-thought monitors teaches models to evade detection while keeping their reasoning human-legible.
Models trained to recognize chain-of-thought monitoring learn to obfuscate their reasoning to evade it.
Penalizing specific chain-of-thought content leads language models to encode that reasoning steganographically.
Current reasoning models have limited control over what they verbalize in their chain of thought.
Reasoning models have lower chain-of-thought controllability than final-output controllability.
Training reasoning models with chain-of-thought length penalties reduces chain-of-thought monitorability.
Optimizing reasoning models' chains of thought against a monitor leads to reward hacking that the monitor cannot detect.
shared · shown elsewhere
+8 more
Evidence that chain-of-thought is mechanistically faithful does not by itself establish its behavioral monitorability, nor vice versa.
Tasks requiring long serial reasoning force language models to externalize reasoning in chain of thought.
shared · shown elsewhere
questionA factual claim that rests on inference from other evidence rather than direct observation.constitution →question page ↗︎
Under what conditions does chain-of-thought monitoring reliably reveal a language model's reasoning?
LeaningThe evidence favors an answer without establishing it.constitution →12 answers
Nothing in the graph builds on this claim yet.
this rests on ↓
claimA box is a claim: a single proposition the graph assesses, with its own page and map. Click any claim to centre the map on it.constitution →quantityA box with a rule beneath its text is a quantity: a value the graph estimates rather than a proposition it affirms or denies. Its estimate stands where a claim's status would.constitution →questionA rounded box is a question: answered rather than affirmed or denied, with its candidate answers, subquestions and presuppositions beneath it. Its mark says how well answered it is.constitution →argumentA pill is an argument: one line of reasoning stating how the claims beneath it combine to bear on the claim above it, for or against. Click one to see its reasoning and open its page.constitution →✓verifiedThe evidence, examined directly, establishes the claim.constitution →↑supportedThe evidence favors the claim, but the examination is incomplete or the evidence is indirect.constitution →⇄inconclusiveThe evidence and argument have been examined and do not come down on either side.constitution →↓doubtfulThe evidence weighs against the claim, but the examination is incomplete or the evidence is indirect.constitution →✕contradictedThe evidence, examined directly, weighs against the claim.constitution →?unknownInsufficient information to assess.constitution →◌unassessedNo current assessment. Attention goes where its expected value is highest and someone funds it; nothing has funded an assessment of this claim yet, and anyone can.constitution →verified factunsettledvalue premisetheoremprizeA double ring marks a claim with a live prize: an amount in owls offered for a machine-checked proof or disproof of its published formal statement. The amount is in the preview and on the claim page; a prize changes nothing about how the claim is assessed or how important it is judged to be.prize rules →⊢machine-checked⊢ marks a claim whose published formal statement has a machine-checked proof or disproof. The checker confirms the proof; the verdict beside it is still the steward's judgment of the claim as worded.prize rules →supportsthis provides evidence for the parentsteward instructions →contradictsthis argues against the parentsteward instructions →assumesbackground the parent's framing takes as givensteward instructions →requiresa load-bearing premise: the parent is false without itsteward instructions →answersa candidate answer to the questionconstitution →Fig. Detail falls off with distance; every claim is an address.