arXiv:2606. 05004v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the widespread deployment of public large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT, protecting user prompt privacy has become an increasingly critical issue.
By Peihua Mai, Xuanrong Gao, Youlong Ding, Xianglong Du, Wei Liu, Yan Pang
arXiv:2606. 18996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Agents are increasingly deployed in document-intensive workflows where sensitive private information is not an edge case but a routine input, e.
By Moon Ye-Bin, Nam Hyeon-Woo, Baek Seong-Eun, Yejin Yeo, Tae-Hyun Oh
arXiv:2512. 16310v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-based agents increasingly use multiple external tools to complete complex tasks.
By Yuxuan Qiao, Dongqin Liu, Hongchang Yang, Wei Zhou, Songlin Hu
TRACE is a new benchmark that evaluates the safety of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) across the entire inference pipeline, including prompts, reasoning traces, and final responses. It provides prompts in two languages covering nine risk categories and ten attack strategies, and for each prompt four LRMs generate traces and responses that are annotated for safety with supporting evidence extracted from the source text. Evaluation of 18 guardrail models on TRACE shows that detecting unsafe content in reasoning traces is much harder than in prompts or final responses, and that current models struggle to extract the necessary evidence.
By Zhenyu Wu, Siyuan Chen, Changchun Yang, Jiaqi Dong, Min Zhou, Ali Almadan, Talal Hammad, Faisal Wahbo, Aminullah Tora, Mona Alshahrani, Xin Gao
arXiv:2608. 14094v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Cloud-local LLM inference systems have the potential to use the reasoning capability of large cloud models while protecting sensitive user data on personal devices.
By Myunghoon Ryu, Geunpyo Park, Sungjoon Lee, XinYu Piao, Jong-Kook Kim
The paper introduces OverThink, a slowdown attack that forces reasoning language models (RLMs) to produce many more reasoning tokens while still giving correct answers. By injecting decoy reasoning problems—such as Markov decision processes, language translation, or graphic comprehension—into the model’s context, attackers can dramatically increase token generation (up to 46× on SQuAD and 17× on coding agents). The study evaluates the attack on both proprietary and open-source RLMs across multiple datasets, explores multimodal and coding‑agent variants, and tests several defenses, concluding that defending against OverThink is challenging and that newer RLMs are even more vulnerable due to higher per‑token costs and increased reasoning token usage.
By Abhinav Kumar, Jaechul Roh, Ali Naseh, Marzena Karpinska, Mohit Iyyer, Amir Houmansadr, Eugene Bagdasarian
arXiv:2606. 14210v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in privacy-sensitive domains, where users must balance the risk of data exposure through external APIs against the high computational cost of local deployment.
By Zixuan Gu, Xiaojun Ye, Yang Liu
arXiv:2608. 11691v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement-learning (RL) post-training equips multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) with exploratory chains of thought (CoT), substantially improving visual reasoning.
By Xinhao Zhong, Yuxia Qiao, Junhao Li, Hao Fang, Yi Sun, Bin Chen
arXiv:2601. 17360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: An adversary observing a model's released prediction can infer sensitive attributes of the queried input, or even reconstruct representatives of the model's training data.
By Jiankai Jin, Xiangzheng Zhang, Zhao Liu, Wenzhuo Xu, Dongdong Yang, Deyue Zhang, Quanchen Zou
The paper introduces GUARD, a method for natural forgetting in large reasoning models that transforms unsafe disclosures into safe-exit trajectories using guided answer‑reasoning distillation. It aligns a frozen model with guidance tokens and distills this behavior into the parameters, aiming for a coherent, non‑disclosing chain of thought followed by a refusal‑style answer. The authors also propose the Natural Forgetting Reasoning Score (NFRS) to evaluate structural stability, fluency, and unsupported substitutes, and demonstrate GUARD’s effectiveness on R‑TOFU and a STAR‑1‑derived harmful‑intent setting.
By Zeyu Yan, Guanghao Zhou, Minghui Qiu, Ming Gao, Cen Chen
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) use explicit chain‑of‑thought reasoning and large context windows to perform complex tasks, but these features create new attack surfaces. The paper introduces SRCF, an attack that steers LRMs by prepending counter‑aligned few‑shot conversations with explicit CoT traces, causing unsafe outputs on harmful queries and unwarranted refusals on benign ones, without needing model internals. To counter this, the authors propose ARCF, a post‑training defense that exposes models to counter‑aligned conversational contexts while enforcing aligned targets, improving safety and helpfulness without harming utility.
By Xiangyu Zhou, Saleh Zare Zade, Dongxiao Zhu
arXiv:2606. 05402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce reasoning traces with non-linear structures, such as backtracking and self-correction, that complicate the evaluation and monitoring of the reasoning process.
By Jinu Lee, Shivam Agarwal, Amruta Parulekar, Siddarth Madala, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Julia Hockenmaier