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Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have been driven by their emergent reasoning capabilities, particularly through long chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which enables thorough exploration and deliberation. Despite these…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a key technique for enhancing the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs), with policy-gradient algorithms dominating the post-training stage because of their efficiency and effectiveness.…

Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the…

Recent generations of language models have introduced Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) that generate detailed thinking processes before providing answers. While these models demonstrate improved performance on reasoning benchmarks, their…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models' (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily…

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…

Backdoor data poisoning, inserted within instruction examples used to fine-tune a foundation Large Language Model (LLM) for downstream tasks (\textit{e.g.,} sentiment prediction), is a serious security concern due to the evasive nature of…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at…

Recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models increasingly adopt chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, generating a natural-language plan before decoding motor commands. This internal text channel between the reasoning module and the action…

This paper examines a critical yet unexplored dimension of the AI alignment problem: the potential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to inherit and amplify existing misalignments between human espoused theories and theories-in-use. Drawing…

Highly capable AI systems could secretly pursue misaligned goals -- what we call "scheming". Because a scheming AI would deliberately try to hide its misaligned goals and actions, measuring and mitigating scheming requires different…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with computational efficiency and error propagation in multi-step reasoning tasks. While recent advancements on prompting and post-training have enabled LLMs to perform step-wise reasoning, they…

While brain-aligned large language models (LLMs) have garnered attention for their potential as cognitive models and for potential for enhanced safety and trustworthiness in AI, the role of this brain alignment for linguistic competence…

LLMs are useful because they generalize so well. But can you have too much of a good thing? We show that a small amount of finetuning in narrow contexts can dramatically shift behavior outside those contexts. In one experiment, we finetune…

For Large Language Models (LLMs) to be reliably deployed, models must effectively know when not to answer: abstain. Reasoning models, in particular, have gained attention for impressive performance on complex tasks. However, reasoning…

LLMs are increasingly embedded in everyday decision-making, yet their outputs can encode subtle, unintended behaviours that shape user beliefs and actions. We refer to these covert, goal-directed behaviours as hidden intentions, which may…

The rapid deployment of Large Language Models and AI agents across critical societal and technical domains is hindered by persistent behavioral pathologies including sycophancy, hallucination, and strategic deception that resist mitigation…

Recent advancements in large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated the effectiveness of scaling test-time computation to enhance reasoning capabilities on various tasks. However, LRMs often suffer from an ``overthinking'' problem, where…