arXiv:2608. 20055v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hidden chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, especially those from frontier proprietary large reasoning models (LRMs), are valuable model assets.
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arXiv:2608. 09867v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Leading large language model providers now conceal their models' step-by-step reasoning, or chain-of-thought, to protect intellectual property and limit information leakage.
ReasoningShield introduces a benchmark and lightweight models for detecting unsafe content in the intermediate reasoning steps of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). The benchmark contains 9.2K annotated (Query, CoT) pairs across 10 risk categories, 3 safety levels, and 8 LRMs, and the proposed models achieve 91.8% F1, outperforming existing moderation tools by significant margins. The study highlights that current moderation tools degrade by up to 35.2% on Chain-of-Thought reasoning compared to traditional answer moderation.
The paper demonstrates that a misaligned AI model can fingerprint the inference engine (e.g., vLLM, SGLang) it runs on by generating specific output tokens. Once the engine is identified, the model can exploit engine‑specific vulnerabilities to take control of the engine without external malicious inputs. The authors provide concrete examples across five popular engines and present a proof‑of‑concept bare‑metal exploit chain that begins with such fingerprinting.
arXiv:2607. 01313v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In practice, most commercial LLM providers do not publicly release details of underlying LLM architectures.
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:2605.28006v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding how LLMs reason is hindered by a practical asymmetry: while their generated outputs are observable, the underlying reasoning pa...