Large language models achieve strong performance on arithmetic reasoning benchmarks, and one common response to arithmetic brittleness is to delegate computation to code. Yet models are still often used in settings where they must reason directly from natural language, and trustworthy models should solve small-number arithmetic word problems without external tools.
The paper investigates how inference optimization for large language models can introduce numerical inconsistencies that trigger hidden backdoors. It introduces two types of optimization‑triggered backdoors: the Input‑Specific Optimization Backdoor (ISOB) and the Universal Optimization Backdoor (UOB), the latter enabling a model to remain benign under normal execution but activate a backdoor when optimization is applied. Experiments on seven open‑source LLMs, across multiple tasks and optimization backends, show UOB can achieve up to 100% attack success while maintaining clean accuracy, and the authors propose three defenses that reduce the attack success rate to 0.02.
By Yifei Wang, Yida Yang, Tianlin Li, Xiaohan Zhang, Xiaoyu Zhang, Li Pan
arXiv:2608. 13129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks yet remain unreliable on elementary numerical tasks, including magnitude comparison, large-integer arithmetic, fractions, and scientific notation.
By Aoxin Ni
The paper introduces SMTrap, a cost‑effective denial‑of‑service attack framework for large reasoning models that does not rely on model feedback or GPU resources. It uses conflict counts from an SMT solver to guide the creation of inference‑heavy constraint satisfaction problem queries, exploiting the models’ backtracking search to induce long output trajectories. Experiments on seven state‑of‑the‑art models show SMTrap achieves DoS effects several times stronger than existing methods, and the authors also present a mitigation tool that reduces token usage.
By Jian Yang, Zhenqi Feng, Zhaoyang Yu, Zhaoxin Fan, Kejian Wu, Xiaofeng Wang, Zheng Zhu, Jianjun Huang, Wei You, Bin Liang
arXiv:2607. 20520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on mathematical problem solving, yet prior work often treats representationally equivalent formulations as interchangeable and conflates reasoning errors with interface failures.
By Sagnik Nath, Edith Aurora Graf, Liang Zhang, Diego Zapata-Rivera
Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong results on mathematical reasoning benchmarks yet remain unreliable on elementary numerical tasks, including magnitude comparison, large-integer arithmetic, fractions, and scientific notation. This survey examines basic numerical understanding as a capability distinct from high-level mathematical reasoning.