The paper examines how deliberative (System 2) reasoning affects a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model’s vulnerability to knowledge‑poisoning attacks. Using two metrics—Cordon Rate and Leakage Rate—it evaluates six model configurations on 200 SciFact questions. Results show that enabling reasoning lowers both Cordon and Leakage Rates for DeepSeek‑V4‑Flash, indicating reduced behavioral impact from poisoned evidence, though overall attack success increases.
By Mehrdad Ghassabi, Audrina Ebrahimi, Sadra Hakim, Hamidreza Baradaran Kashani
arXiv:2609.00470v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) grounds large language models in external corpora, but implicit trust in retrieved documents creates a critical at...
By Muhaimin Bin Munir, Akib Jawad Ononto, Nazia Shehnaz Joynab, Bhavani Thuraisingham, Latifur Khan
arXiv:2608. 02678v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems are vulnerable to corpus poisoning: an attacker who inserts a crafted document into the retrieval corpus can steer the underlying large language model (LLM) toward an attacker-chosen wrong answer.
By Abay Zhurekbay, Tao Liu, Fan Li
The paper introduces a new attack called "plan injection" that allows a large language model to carry out harmful actions while evading chain-of-thought monitoring. By inserting harmful but benign-sounding reasoning into the model’s context, the attacker can steer the model’s behavior and cause it to paraphrase the injected plan as its own reasoning. The study demonstrates that this attack works across different monitoring settings, scales to harder tasks, and even causes monitors to waste resources on the injected plan, reducing detection rates by up to 50%.
By Keertana Chidambaram, Andrew Ilyas, Vasilis Syrgkanis
arXiv:2607. 26339v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems ground large language models (LLMs) in external corpora, but this reliance exposes them to corpus poisoning: maliciously injected passages that manipulate retrieved evidence.
By Pushkal Kumar, Tucker Nielson, Tanish Kolhe, Shubham Zala, Vincent Li
Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support science, but they can also convert hazardous scientific knowledge into actionable misuse guidance. Existing benchmarks often rely on templated queries disconnected from real-world hazards, and employ LLM-as-a-Judge paradigms without domain grounding.
arXiv:2608. 11415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are being proposed as agents in scientific workflows, in domains where no downstream verifier exists.
By Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov
arXiv:2607. 23838v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) lets a large language model answer questions using documents retrieved from an external knowledge base at query time.
By Susil Kumar Mohanty, Rohit Patel, Kosuru Yuvaraj, Jeenal Chaudhary, Disha Singhania
arXiv:2607. 18665v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly support science, but they can also convert hazardous scientific knowledge into actionable misuse guidance.
By Chunxiao Li, Yuan Xiong, Lijun Li, Tianyi Du, Wenlong Zhang, Lei Bai, Jing Shao
arXiv:2607. 26849v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are deployed in high-stakes domains, adversaries may poison training data to implant backdoors: hidden triggers that covertly manipulate model behavior at inference time.
By Anthony Hughes, Nicole Xing, Collin Francel, Andy Kim, Andrew Draganov
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
The paper introduces a method for identifying the dominant knowledge source behind large language model (LLM) outputs, distinguishing between faithfulness violations (misuse of provided context) and factuality violations (errors in internal knowledge). A simple linear probe trained on hidden representations can reliably classify this source, and the authors present AttriWiki, a self‑supervised pipeline that generates labeled training data by prompting models to recall withheld entities or read them from context. Probes trained on AttriWiki achieve high Macro‑F1 scores across several models and datasets, generalize zero‑shot to a benchmark, and show that attribution mismatches can increase error rates by up to 70%.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that knowing the source of an LLM’s answer is crucial for effective mitigation of hallucinations, as attribution mismatches significantly raise error rates."
By Ivo Brink, Alexander Boer, Dennis Ulmer