Timothy H. Kostolansky

dblp:409/0596 · DBLP profile ↗
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1ranked-venue papers
0as first author
1since 2021 · last 2025
—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 1 · 1 since 2021

Expertise — from the expertise taxonomy: the topics of the expert's papers under the CCF categories. A weight counts papers with recency: 1 for a paper about the topic, 0.3 when the topic is its context, halved every five years.

Artificial intelligence
1 paper
Trustworthy machine learning · 80% Information extraction and text analysis · 20%

Topics — the 5 heaviest of 5, each with the papers that count most for it

TopicWeightPapersLastEvidence papers
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
AI safety
0.912025
CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoring · NeurIPS 2025
Natural language and speech › Information extraction and text analysis › text classification
deception detection
0.912025
CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoring · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
interpretability
0.912025
CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoring · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning › safety evaluation
red teaming
0.912025
CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoring · NeurIPS 2025
Machine learning › Trustworthy machine learning
robustness
0.912025
CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoring · NeurIPS 2025

Methods — techniques the papers use, named apart from their topics

weighted average scoring · 0.9chain-of-thought · 0.9
YearPublicationVenuePosition
2025 CoT Red-Handed: Stress Testing Chain-of-Thought Monitoring
abstract
As AI models are deployed with increasing autonomy, it is important to ensure they do not take harmful actions unnoticed. As a potential mitigation, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring, wherein a weaker trusted monitor model continuously oversees the intermediate reasoning steps of a more powerful but untrusted model. We compare CoT monitoring to action-only monitoring, where only final outputs are reviewed, in a red-teaming setup where the untrusted model is instructed to pursue harmful side tasks while completing a coding problem. We find that while CoT monitoring is more effective than overseeing only model outputs in scenarios where action-only monitoring fails to reliably identify sabotage, reasoning traces can contain misleading rationalizations that deceive the CoT monitors, reducing performance in obvious sabotage cases. To address this, we introduce a hybrid protocol that independently scores model reasoning and actions, and combines them using a weighted average. Our hybrid monitor consistently outperforms both CoT and action-only monitors across all tested models and tasks, with detection rates twice higher than action-only monitoring for subtle deception scenarios.
Benjamin Arnav, Pablo Bernabeu-Perez, Nathan Helm-Burger, Timothy H. Kostolansky, Hannes Whittingham, Mary Phuong
NeurIPS4