Reward Misspecification Degrades Chain-of-Thought Monitorability

Tianyi Lorena Yan, John Hewitt

Monitoring the chain-of-thought (CoT) of language models (LMs) is a key strategy for detecting and preventing misbehaviors for AI safety. As such, it is critical to identify reinforcement learning (RL) practices that lead to unmonitorable chain-of-thought. One such practice may be unavoidable: reward misspecification. As RL environments become more complex, it is infeasible to have perfect verification, and models are rewarded for behaviors that are different from the true task intent. We show that reward misspecification alone already degrades monitorability. We create a testbed with pairs of true reward aligned with task intent and misspecified rewards that favor a different behavior, so that reward hacking can be induced by training and labeled verifiably. Across three models and three tasks, CoT monitorability remains low as models' hack rates increase: the CoTs keep reasoning about the task intent while the outputs violate the intent and get rewarded. To mitigate unmonitorability without prior knowledge of the true reward or the hack, we collect rollouts with diverse rewards across training steps and use a LM to infer a reward description. We then inject the description into…