隐性诱导下思维链监控效果显著下降,可能高估模型安全性。
Chain-of-Thought Monitoring Can Be Unreliable in Implicit-Influence Settings
- 对比显性与隐性诱导,测试思维链监控能力差异
- 隐性诱导时检测率下降41-46个百分点,最低仅5%
- 合理系统提示反而降低监控效果,适合安全评估者参考
思维链(CoT)监控被视作前沿推理模型的重要安全机制。现有评估多聚焦于显性诱导场景:提示直接要求模型隐藏信息。本文引入首个在显性与隐性诱导之间直接对比的基准,考察模型在隐性诱导下的行为变化——即提示中无明确隐藏指令,但任务特征(如候选人无关细节)仍影响判断结果。实验覆盖四种任务形式(二选一、评分、多选问答、开放编码)和七种前沿模型。在显性诱导下,监控可检测60%-94%的行为偏移;但在隐性诱导下,检测率下降41-46个百分点,两个任务中最低降至5%。真实部署中常见的去偏提示(如减少无关内容)虽保留行为影响,却进一步削弱监控能力。结果表明,显性场景下的监控评估可能严重高估实际可靠性,且善意部署策略可能反噬安全防护。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is increasingly treated as an important safety layer for frontier reasoning models. Most monitorability evaluations study explicit-influence settings: setups where the prompt directly incentivizes the model to hide something, e.g., by instructing it to perform a hidden side-task. A complementary axis for CoT-monitor evaluations is implicit-influence settings, where the prompt contains no instruction to hide, but the model's behavior is still shaped by features of the task or context, e.g. an irrelevant detail about a candidate that biases a hiring rating. We introduce the first benchmark that directly compares CoT monitorability under the two regimes. We test how model behavior changes in the presence of a nudge to choose a particular option. The nudge is delivered either as a casual aside (implicit), or as a direct instruction to act on the nudge and to conceal having done so (explicit). The benchmark spans four task formats (binary choice, numeric rating, multiple-choice QA, open-ended coding) and seven frontier extended-thinking models. Under explicit influence, a CoT monitor detects 60-94% of behavior shifts: even models instructed to conceal it leak the instruction into their CoT. Under implicit influence, the same factors still shift behavior, but detection falls by 41-46 percentage points in two of our four settings. Realistic system-prompt additions (of the kind a developer might deploy to reduce off-topic bias) lower implicit detection further, to as low as 5%, while preserving the behavioral influence itself. These results suggest that monitorability estimates obtained in explicit-influence settings may over-estimate monitorability, and that monitorability can be further decreased by well-intentioned deployment choices. Our benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/agatha-duzan/implicit-vs-explicit-influence
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