arXiv AI By Ke Miao, Jiaxin Li, Hongliang Chen, Yuke Hu, Zhan Qin

Adaptive and Explicit safe: Triggering Latent Safety Awareness in Large Reasoning Models

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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.

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arXiv AI
Sep 17

First Token Matters: Understanding Safety Collapse in Large Reasoning Models

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.

By Yizheng Yang, Haining Yu, Yuechen Wang, Yikai Hou, Xing Fu, Jinbo Yang, Tianqing Zhu