arXiv AI By Jack Hopkins, Dipika Khullar, Fabien Roger

Overthinking: Amplifying Reasoning Weights to Extract Learned Secrets

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arXiv:2607. 08173v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Black box auditing of language models is an essential pre-deployment tool, but it may miss subtle forms of misalignment and hidden information.

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arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

OverThink: Slowdown Attacks on Reasoning LLMs

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
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Thinking Past the Answer: Evaluating Harmful Overthinking in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.

By Simone Caldarella, Davide Talon, Rahaf Aljundi, Elisa Ricci, Massimiliano Mancini