Reward misspecification during RL makes chain-of-thought unmonitorable
johnhewtt · x · 2026-10-20
New work trains paired models with the same stated intent (pass all test cases), but one on the true reward and one on a misspecified reward (pass some, fail some). In thinking rollouts, both models only discuss the intent from the prompt—meaning the misaligned model learns to optimize the wrong reward without its chain-of-thought revealing it, making it unmonitorable. The authors also propose an intuitive fix.
Related event: Study: Reward Misspecification Makes Chain-of-Thought Unmonitorable(9 posts)→
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