LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Extract-and-Evaluate Monitoring Can Significantly Enhance CoT Monitoring Performance (Research Note)” by Rauno Arike, RohanS, Shubhorup Biswas


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Work produced at Aether. Thanks to Benjamin Arnav for providing us experimentation data and for helpful discussions, and to Francis Rhys Ward and Matt MacDermott for useful feedback.

Executive Summary

  • We apply a two-step chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring scheme to transcripts from Arnav et al. (2025) and find that this substantially outperforms simple CoT monitors: our extract-and-evaluate monitoring approach improves monitor catch rate at 1% FPR by 23.7 percentage points, averaged over all models, tasks, and attack policies.
  • Extract-and-evaluate monitoring involves a lower-level monitor that reasons about the attacker's trajectory and picks out possibly suspicious quotes from it, and a higher-level monitor that only sees the original task and the quotes and assigns a suspicion score to the trajectory on that basis. After showing that this approach outperforms other monitors, we demonstrate small additional gains from using stronger models as the low-level and high-level monitors.
  • We consider this as evidence there [...]

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Outline:

(00:27) Executive Summary

(01:55) Motivation

(03:24) Experiment Setting

(04:57) Extract-and-Evaluate Monitoring

(08:30) Results: GPT 4.1-mini as both the Quote Extractor and the Judge

(10:33) Results: GPT 4.1-mini as the Quote Extractor, GPT 4.1 as the Judge

(15:08) Future Work

(17:49) Author Contributions Statement

(18:16) Appendix A: Details about the Experiment Setting

(19:15) Appendix B: CoT+action Monitor and Quote Extractor Prompt

(19:25) Appendix C: Judge Prompt

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First published:

August 8th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nRcKDYi2KfRTXdvDF/extract-and-evaluate-monitoring-can-significantly-enhance

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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