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Hauptverfasser: Emmons, Scott, Zimmermann, Roland S., Elson, David K., Shah, Rohin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23966
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author Emmons, Scott
Zimmermann, Roland S.
Elson, David K.
Shah, Rohin
author_facet Emmons, Scott
Zimmermann, Roland S.
Elson, David K.
Shah, Rohin
contents While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring offers a unique opportunity for AI safety, this opportunity could be lost through shifts in training practices or model architecture. To help preserve monitorability, we propose a pragmatic way to measure two components of it: legibility (whether the reasoning can be followed by a human) and coverage (whether the CoT contains all the reasoning needed for a human to also produce the final output). We implement these metrics with an autorater prompt that enables any capable LLM to compute the legibility and coverage of existing CoTs. After sanity-checking our prompted autorater with synthetic CoT degradations, we apply it to several frontier models on challenging benchmarks, finding that they exhibit high monitorability. We present these metrics, including our complete autorater prompt, as a tool for developers to track how design decisions impact monitorability. While the exact prompt we share is still a preliminary version under ongoing development, we are sharing it now in the hopes that others in the community will find it useful. Our method helps measure the default monitorability of CoT - it should be seen as a complement, not a replacement, for the adversarial stress-testing needed to test robustness against deliberately evasive models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_23966
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Pragmatic Way to Measure Chain-of-Thought Monitorability
Emmons, Scott
Zimmermann, Roland S.
Elson, David K.
Shah, Rohin
Machine Learning
Software Engineering
While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring offers a unique opportunity for AI safety, this opportunity could be lost through shifts in training practices or model architecture. To help preserve monitorability, we propose a pragmatic way to measure two components of it: legibility (whether the reasoning can be followed by a human) and coverage (whether the CoT contains all the reasoning needed for a human to also produce the final output). We implement these metrics with an autorater prompt that enables any capable LLM to compute the legibility and coverage of existing CoTs. After sanity-checking our prompted autorater with synthetic CoT degradations, we apply it to several frontier models on challenging benchmarks, finding that they exhibit high monitorability. We present these metrics, including our complete autorater prompt, as a tool for developers to track how design decisions impact monitorability. While the exact prompt we share is still a preliminary version under ongoing development, we are sharing it now in the hopes that others in the community will find it useful. Our method helps measure the default monitorability of CoT - it should be seen as a complement, not a replacement, for the adversarial stress-testing needed to test robustness against deliberately evasive models.
title A Pragmatic Way to Measure Chain-of-Thought Monitorability
topic Machine Learning
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23966