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...
By Yifei Yang, Zouying Cao, Xingrui Wang, Xiao Zhou, Yuexian Li, Dongjie Yang, Hai Zhao
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...
By Yu-Hang Wu, Yu-Jie Xiong, Henghua Zhang, Bairui Zhang, Jia-Chen Zhang, Shaohua Li
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.
By Hongli Shen, Shaopeng Fu, Qinbo Zhang, Jian Li, Di Wang
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.
By Ke Miao, Jiaxin Li, Hongliang Chen, Yuke Hu, Zhan Qin
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.
By Xiangyu Zhou, Saleh Zare Zade, Dongxiao Zhu
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.
By Abhinav Kumar, Jaechul Roh, Ali Naseh, Marzena Karpinska, Mohit Iyyer, Amir Houmansadr, Eugene Bagdasarian