Mar 23, 2026

Testing OOCR Transfer from Evasion Technique Descriptions to Chain-of-Thought Monitor Avoidance

Daniel Polak, Marcel Windys, Jakub Nowak

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a key technique in AI control, but its robustness may depend in part on whether models can acquire evasion strategies from their training data through out-of-context reasoning (OOCR). We test this by fine-tuning DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B on synthetic Q&A pairs describing a fictional evasion technique claiming that reasoning in French reduces detection by English-language CoT monitors. We find a negative result: the fine-tuned model did not adopt French reasoning under any evaluation condition, including when explicitly prompted to evade monitoring. The model could not adopt the described technique in our tests.

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Cite this work

@misc {

title={

(HckPrj) Testing OOCR Transfer from Evasion Technique Descriptions to Chain-of-Thought Monitor Avoidance

},

author={

Daniel Polak, Marcel Windys, Jakub Nowak

},

date={

3/23/26

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

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This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
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