Chain-of-thought obfuscation learned from output supervision can generalise to unseen tasks

ArXi:2601.23086v2 Announce Type: replace Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning provides a significant performance uplift to LLMs by enabling planning, exploration, and deliberation of their actions. CoT is also a powerful tool for monitoring the behaviours of these agents: when faithful, they offer interpretations of the model's decision making process, and an early warning sign for dangerous behaviours. However, optimisation pressures placed on the CoT may cause the model to obfuscate reasoning traces, losing this beneficial property.