arXiv:2609.36254v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are commonly trained with reinforcement learning (RL) to improve their generation of chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning bef...
By Xiangyu Zhou, Saleh Zare Zade, Rafi Ibn Sultan, Alexander Kotov, Dongxiao Zhu
The paper introduces "cunning questions"—non‑safety prompts that contain misleading premises or subtle inconsistencies—to train large language models (LLMs) to scrutinize underlying intent and assumptions. Experiments show that incorporating these questions improves robustness against out‑of‑distribution jailbreak attacks and enhances subsequent safety fine‑tuning, achieving a new state‑of‑the‑art reduction in mean ASR from 17.40% to 15.05% across nine backbone–benchmark combinations. The authors argue that this training fosters vigilance, enabling models to prioritize safety judgments before engaging in harmful planning.
By Youjia Wang, Lin Xu, Yang Sun, Yuxiao Lu, Chengfang Fang, Jie Shi
arXiv:2607. 20444v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can produce deceptive responses: outputs that mislead users in service of a contextually or experimentally induced goal.
By Ali Asad, Stephen Obadinma, Anshul Pattoo, Wenxuan Zhang, Xiaodan Zhu
The paper identifies a vulnerability in large language models where harmful intent can be hidden within benign narratives, a phenomenon termed Semantic Camouflage. By examining latent activation patterns across several small language model families, the authors discover an "Intent Horizon"—a layer depth where harmful intent representations collapse. They propose Latent Intent Verification (LIV), a lightweight probing defense that detects harmful intent in early layers and outperforms existing guardrails on the PKU-SafeRLHF dataset.
By Md. Hasib Ur Rahman
The paper introduces CoT-Interpretability Alignment (CIA), a metric that quantifies how well a large language model’s chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations match its internal reasoning processes. Evaluated on two-hop question answering, hint intervention, and integer multiplication across three LLMs, the study finds limited alignment (44.8–75.9%) and demonstrates that post‑training with a reward combining task accuracy and parametric faithfulness can substantially improve CoT faithfulness without sacrificing accuracy. The authors provide a framework for auditing CoT faithfulness and a pathway to making explicit reasoning more trustworthy, with code and data publicly available.
By Yihuai Hong, Shauli Ravfogel, Chen Zhao, Eunsol Choi
arXiv:2606. 31748v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety training on language models often induces over-refusal: improved safety on harmful prompts at the cost of increased refusal on harmless ones.
By Taeyoun Kim, Aviral Kumar