CoTs remain monitorable when being unfaithful requires computation: Replicating and Extending the Necessity Effect Across Eleven Models
While a LLM's chain of thought (CoT) is a promising approach to interpreting model outputs, prior work shows CoT's content does not always accurately reflect the reasoning process. Emmons et al. (2025) finds that models can follow a question hint without revealing so in its chain of thought, but when the hint is sufficiently complex the computation is forced into the CoT. This claim, however, has only been tested on Gemini models, and the datasets and code is closed source. We replicate their proxy task across eleven models from six families and find the necessity effect generalizes. Every model follows simple cues above a no-hint baseline, while concealed complex-cue following falls back...
| Authors | Arav Dhoot, Yixiong Hao, Zephaniah Roe |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 17 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 October 2026 |
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