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

Author: LessWrong ([email protected])
Published: Sat 09 Aug 2025
Episode Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nRcKDYi2KfRTXdvDF/extract-and-evaluate-monitoring-can-significantly-enhance

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