Large language models achieve strong performance on arithmetic reasoning benchmarks, and one common response to arithmetic brittleness is to delegate computation to code. Yet models are still often used in settings where they must reason directly from natural language, and trustworthy models should solve small-number arithmetic word problems without external tools.
arXiv:2606. 03606v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models achieve strong performance on arithmetic reasoning benchmarks, and one common response to arithmetic brittleness is to delegate computation to code.
arXiv:2608. 13129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks yet remain unreliable on elementary numerical tasks, including magnitude comparison, large-integer arithmetic, fractions, and scientific notation.
The paper investigates how inference optimization for large language models can introduce numerical inconsistencies that trigger hidden backdoors. It introduces two types of optimization‑triggered backdoors: the Input‑Specific Optimization Backdoor (ISOB) and the Universal Optimization Backdoor (UOB), the latter enabling a model to remain benign under normal execution but activate a backdoor when optimization is applied. Experiments on seven open‑source LLMs, across multiple tasks and optimization backends, show UOB can achieve up to 100% attack success while maintaining clean accuracy, and the authors propose three defenses that reduce the attack success rate to 0.02.
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks yet remain unreliable on elementary numerical tasks, including magnitude comparison, large-integer arithmetic, fractions, and scientific notation. This survey examines basic numerical understanding as a capability distinct from high-level mathematical reasoning.
The paper introduces SMTrap, a cost‑effective denial‑of‑service attack framework for large reasoning models that does not rely on model feedback or GPU resources. It uses conflict counts from an SMT solver to guide the creation of inference‑heavy constraint satisfaction problem queries, exploiting the models’ backtracking search to induce long output trajectories. Experiments on seven state‑of‑the‑art models show SMTrap achieves DoS effects several times stronger than existing methods, and the authors also present a mitigation tool that reduces token usage.
arXiv:2607. 20520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on mathematical problem solving, yet prior work often treats representationally equivalent formulations as interchangeable and conflates reasoning errors with interface failures.
Model merging composes specialized capabilities into a single LLM by aggregating task vectors sourced from unverified public platforms, exposing a critical supply-chain attack surface: Because any malicious behavior can be encoded into a task vector, and merging grants third-party vectors direct write access to model weights, an attacker-provided task vector can enable or amplify diverse downstream threats. Prior work studies only backdoor attacks against model merging for classifiers using static arithmetic heuristics, which fail to effectively handle diverse attacks on generative LLMs for three reasons.
arXiv:2607. 01280v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Programming-by-example systems infer programs from a small set of input-output examples.
arXiv:2606. 11409v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Adversarial robustness evaluations of large language models (LLMs) typically report attack success rate (ASR) under fixed query budgets, implicitly treating all attacks as equally costly.
Large Language Models (LLMs) consume and produce a single sequence of text; hence, if text can be added to the beginning of the LLM's response, i.e., an output prefix, then all subsequent tokens will...
arXiv:2606. 07968v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning-capable large language models can be induced to spend their generation budget on injected decoy tasks rather than answering the user's question, causing denial of service when no final answer is produced and denial of wallet when excess output tokens are billed.
arXiv:2607. 18266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small language models are attractive for local deployment, but they often struggle with multi-step arithmetic reasoning.