Obfuscated Reasoning

Obfuscated Reasoning investigates how chain-of-thought based oversight can fail when models learn to hide their reasoning. By training models under process supervision that discourages certain phrases in explanations, the project shows that models can steganographically encode their reasoning using alternative strings, while leaving task performance and underlying computation intact, and that this behaviour can generalise to new tasks. This illustrates a concrete failure mode where monitoring chain-of-thought traces alone is insufficient for reliable oversight.

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