Hodoscope: Unsupervised Monitoring for AI Misbehaviors

Abstract

Existing approaches to monitoring AI agents rely on supervised evaluation: human-written rules or LLM-based judges that check for known failure modes. However, novel misbehaviors may fall outside predefined categories entirely and LLM-based judges can be unreliable. To address this, we formulate unsupervised monitoring, drawing an analogy to unsupervised learning. Rather than checking for specific misbehaviors, an unsupervised monitor assists humans in discovering problematic agent behaviors without prior assumptions about what counts as problematic, leaving that determination to the human. We observe that problematic behaviors are often distinctive: a model exploiting a benchmark loophole exhibits actions absent from well-behaved baselines, and a vulnerability unique to one evaluation manifests as behavioral anomalies when the same model runs across multiple benchmarks. This motivates using group-wise behavioral differences as the primary signal for unsupervised monitoring. We introduce Hodoscope, a tool that operationalizes this insight. Hodoscope compares behavior distributions across groups and highlights distinctive and potentially suspicious action patterns for human review. Using Hodoscope, we discover a previously unknown vulnerability in the Commit0 benchmark (unsquashed git history allowing ground-truth recovery, inflating scores for at least five models) and independently recover known exploits on ImpossibleBench and SWE-bench. Quantitative evaluation estimates that our method reduces review effort by 6-23$\times$ compared to naive uniform sampling. Finally, we show that behavior descriptions discovered through Hodoscope could improve the detection accuracy of LLM-based judges, demonstrating a path from unsupervised to supervised monitoring.