English

Quant Fever, Reasoning Blackholes, Schrodinger's Compliance, and More: Probing GPT-OSS-20B

Artificial Intelligence 2025-10-07 v2 Cryptography and Security

Abstract

OpenAI's GPT-OSS family provides open-weight language models with explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and a Harmony prompt format. We summarize an extensive security evaluation of GPT-OSS-20B that probes the model's behavior under different adversarial conditions. Using the Jailbreak Oracle (JO) [1], a systematic LLM evaluation tool, the study uncovers several failure modes including quant fever, reasoning blackholes, Schrodinger's compliance, reasoning procedure mirage, and chain-oriented prompting. Experiments demonstrate how these behaviors can be exploited on the GPT-OSS-20B model, leading to severe consequences.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.23882,
  title  = {Quant Fever, Reasoning Blackholes, Schrodinger's Compliance, and More: Probing GPT-OSS-20B},
  author = {Shuyi Lin and Tian Lu and Zikai Wang and Bo Wen and Yibo Zhao and Cheng Tan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.23882},
  year   = {2025}
}