arXiv:2506. 07031v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Emerging Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) consistently excel in mathematical and reasoning tasks, showcasing remarkable capabilities.
arXiv:2609.23587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) incur high inference costs, often mitigated by efficiency techniques like quantization and pruning. However, the impact o...
arXiv:2609.08186v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The emergence of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has established a robust foundation for Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). While deep reasoning is widely believed...
arXiv:2608. 09542v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve remarkable success on complex tasks but remain vulnerable to harmful prompts that induce unsafe outputs.
arXiv:2606. 16808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex tasks, they remain highly vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreaks and direct harmful queries.
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.
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.
arXiv:2608. 02820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is an increasingly important component of AI safety stacks but relies on the assumption that a model's reasoning trace is informative about its actions.
arXiv:2606. 10740v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Failures in multi-turn reasoning models are largely invisible to terminal-score evaluation.
arXiv:2607. 07903v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable capabilities but remain highly vulnerable to adversarial prompts and jailbreak attacks.
The paper investigates whether neuro‑symbolic (NeSy) AI models, which combine neural perception with symbolic reasoning, can mitigate backdoor attacks. It presents a systematic evaluation comparing the NeSy framework DeepProbLog to baseline neural networks across eight backdoor settings and four reasoning tasks. Results indicate that NeSy models are generally more robust than pure neural models, but their resilience depends heavily on how strictly the reasoning process is enforced and its alignment with the attack target.
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.
The paper investigates why large reasoning models (LRMs) lose safety alignment when faced with harmful queries. By analyzing token-level refusal dynamics, the authors identify a vulnerability called Onset Refusal Collapse (ORC), where the refusal signal drops sharply at the first generated token, leading to unsafe responses. They introduce SafeToken, a lightweight inference-time intervention that injects a learned safety anchor at reasoning onset, which mitigates ORC, improves safety on harmful-query benchmarks, and largely preserves reasoning utility.