"Proposal for tracking the effects of architecture on monitorability" by ryan_greenblatt, Alek Westover, Lukas Finnveden cover art

"Proposal for tracking the effects of architecture on monitorability" by ryan_greenblatt, Alek Westover, Lukas Finnveden

"Proposal for tracking the effects of architecture on monitorability" by ryan_greenblatt, Alek Westover, Lukas Finnveden

Listen for free

View show details
Architectures that incorporate opaque recurrence or allow for agents to communicate with each other using latents could rapidly make it much harder to monitor chains of thought or communication (we’ll refer to this property as “monitorability” going forward). As companies begin to explore such architectures, we believe it is important to transparently share evidence about how monitorability varies with architecture and training method. To inform the scientific debate on how to make tradeoffs between performance and monitorability, we believe AI companies should:

  1. Regularly report externally verified information about the degree to which their architectures may allow for latent reasoning or communication. Companies should publicly disclose enough information about architectures to allow external scientists to determine whether they could potentially enable models to perform much more complex reasoning without this reasoning appearing in the chain of thought (“latent reasoning”) or allow for latent communication between different instances of a model.

    Following GDM, we propose measuring opaque serial depth as a minimally-invasive proxy for the degree to which an architecture may enable latent reasoning, though companies could provide sufficient architecture transparency in other ways. We propose that companies work with third-party evaluators to produce independently verified reports of the rough distribution of [...]
---

Outline:

(05:57) Appendix: A sketch of what stress tests of CoT monitorability could look like

(06:31) Testing monitorability in control settings

(07:57) Testing monitorability on deployment-time misbehaviors

(08:55) Testing qualitative monitorability on (hopefully realistic) model organisms

The original text contained 13 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:
September 10th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hLPGv8QjPcNLtDp3A/proposal-for-tracking-the-effects-of-architecture-on

---



Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.