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Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve task performance through extended inference-time reasoning. Although previous studies suggest that longer reasoning should lead to more robust safety behavior, we find evidence to the contrary:…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jianli Zhao , Tingchen Fu , Rylan Schaeffer , Mrinank Sharma , Fazl Barez

Recent work has demonstrated that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) often yields limited gains for soft-reasoning problems such as analytical and commonsense reasoning. CoT can also be unfaithful to a model's actual reasoning. We investigate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zongqian Wu , Baoduo Xu , Ruochen Cui , Mengmeng Zhan , Xiaofeng Zhu , Lei Feng

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, they remain highly susceptible to jailbreak attacks that undermine their safety alignment. Existing defense mechanisms typically…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yu Pan , Wenlong Yu , Tiejun Wu , Xiaohu Ye , Qiannan Si , Guangquan Xu , Bin Wu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is useful for monitoring language models only when the reasoning trace faithfully reflects the computation that produces the final answer. However, models can rely on prompt-to-answer shortcuts that bypass…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinghan Jia , Joe Benton , Eric Easley

Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model's CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effectiveness of such monitoring hinges on CoTs faithfully…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) enhances an LLM's ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, but it also introduces new security issues. In this work, we present ShadowCoT, a novel backdoor attack framework that targets the internal reasoning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Gejian Zhao , Hanzhou Wu , Xinpeng Zhang , Athanasios V. Vasilakos

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting boosts Language Models' (LM) performance on a gamut of complex reasoning tasks, the generated reasoning chain does not necessarily reflect how the model arrives at the answer (aka. faithfulness). We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Qing Lyu , Shreya Havaldar , Adam Stein , Li Zhang , Delip Rao , Eric Wong , Marianna Apidianaki , Chris Callison-Burch

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. Previous work attempts to evaluate it but falls short in providing an in-depth analysis of patterns that influence the CoT. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Yubo Chen , Jiexin Xu , Huaijun Li , Xiaojian Jiang , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but have also introduced their computational efficiency as a new attack surface. In this paper, we…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Shuaitong Liu , Renjue Li , Lijia Yu , Lijun Zhang , Zhiming Liu , Gaojie Jin

As AI systems approach dangerous capability levels where inability safety cases become insufficient, we need alternative approaches to ensure safety. This paper presents a roadmap for constructing safety cases based on chain-of-thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Julian Schulz

Large language models (LLMs) are vital for a wide range of applications yet remain susceptible to jailbreak threats, which could lead to the generation of inappropriate responses. Conventional defenses, such as refusal and adversarial…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Xianglin Yang , Gelei Deng , Jieming Shi , Tianwei Zhang , Jin Song Dong

While chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is an appealing AI safety defense, recent work on "unfaithfulness" has cast doubt on its reliability. These findings highlight an important failure mode, particularly when CoT acts as a post-hoc…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Scott Emmons , Erik Jenner , David K. Elson , Rif A. Saurous , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Heng Chen , Irhum Shafkat , Rohin Shah

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on complex multi-step reasoning, yet they still exhibit severe safety failures such as harmful content generation. Existing methods often apply coarse-grained constraints over the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Yingzhi Mao , Chunkang Zhang , Junxiang Wang , Xinyan Guan , Boxi Cao , Yaojie Lu , Hongyu Lin , Xianpei Han , Le Sun

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proposed as a transparency mechanism for large language models in safety-critical deployments, yet its effectiveness depends on faithfulness (whether models accurately verbalize the factors that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Richard J. Young

Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with a great ability of text and image understanding have received great attention. To achieve better reasoning with MLLMs, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been widely explored, which further promotes MLLMs'…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zefeng Wang , Zhen Han , Shuo Chen , Fan Xue , Zifeng Ding , Xun Xiao , Volker Tresp , Philip Torr , Jindong Gu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing large language models' capabilities by generating intermediate reasoning steps for complex tasks. A common practice for equipping LLMs with reasoning is to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Harsh Chaudhari , Ethan Rathbun , Hanna Foerster , Jamie Hayes , Matthew Jagielski , Milad Nasr , Ilia Shumailov , Alina Oprea

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manqing Liu , David Williams-King , Ida Caspary , Linh Le , Hannes Whittingham , Puria Radmard , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) leverage Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks, but this explicit reasoning process introduces a critical vulnerability: adversarial manipulation of the thought chain itself, known as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Zihao Xue , Zhen Bi , Long Ma , Zhenlin Hu , Yan Wang , Xueshu Chen , Zhenfang Liu , Kang Zhao , Jie Xiao , Jungang Lou
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