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Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable improvements in mathematical reasoning capabilities through long Chain-of-Thought. The reasoning tokens of these models enable self-correction within reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Yu Cui , Bryan Hooi , Yujun Cai , Yiwei Wang

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on benign narrow data can sometimes induce broad harmful behaviors, a vulnerability termed emergent misalignment (EM). While prior work links these failures to specific directions in the activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Krishak Aneja , Manas Mittal , Anmol Goel , Ponnurangam Kumaraguru , Vamshi Krishna Bonagiri

Modern large language models rely on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to achieve impressive performance, yet the same mechanism can amplify deceptive alignment, situations in which a model appears aligned while covertly pursuing misaligned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jiaming Ji , Wenqi Chen , Kaile Wang , Donghai Hong , Sitong Fang , Boyuan Chen , Jiayi Zhou , Juntao Dai , Sirui Han , Yike Guo , Yaodong Yang

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in large language models' (LLMs) reasoning, which is largely due to the chain-of-thought (CoT) approaches, allowing models to generate intermediate reasoning steps before reaching the final…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Zuoli Tang , Junjie Ou , Kaiqin Hu , Chunwei Wu , Zhaoxin Huan , Chilin Fu , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Chenliang Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) can acquire deceptive behaviors through backdoor attacks, where the model executes prohibited actions whenever secret triggers appear in the input. Existing safety training methods largely fail to address this…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Guangyu Shen , Siyuan Cheng , Xiangzhe Xu , Yuan Zhou , Hanxi Guo , Zhuo Zhang , Xiangyu Zhang

Fine-tuning lets practitioners repurpose aligned large language models (LLMs) for new domains, yet recent work reveals emergent misalignment (EMA): Even a small, domain-specific fine-tune can induce harmful behaviors far outside the target…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 David Kaczér , Magnus Jørgenvåg , Clemens Vetter , Esha Afzal , Robin Haselhorst , Lucie Flek , Florian Mai

Reinforcement learning (RL) finetuning has become a key technique for enhancing large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks, motivating its extension to vision-language models (VLMs). While RL-tuned VLMs improve on visual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Rosie Zhao , Anshul Shah , Xiaoyu Zhu , Xinke Deng , Zhongyu Jiang , Yang Yang , Joerg Liebelt , Arnab Mondal

Emergent misalignment (EM), where fine-tuning on a narrow task (like insecure code) causes broad misalignment across unrelated domains, was first demonstrated by Betley et al. (2025). We conduct the most comprehensive EM study to date,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Joel Schreiber , Ariel Goldstein

Recent findings suggest that misaligned models may exhibit deceptive behavior, raising concerns about output trustworthiness. Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a promising tool for alignment monitoring: when models articulate their reasoning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Artur Zolkowski , Wen Xing , David Lindner , Florian Tramèr , Erik Jenner

While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it requires models to verbalize every intermediate step in text tokens, constraining the model thoughts to the discrete vocabulary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Weihao Liu , Dehai Min , Lu Cheng

Latent tokens are gaining attention for enhancing reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet their internal mechanisms remain unclear. This paper examines the problem from a reliability perspective, uncovering fundamental weaknesses:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Yuyi Zhang , Boyu Tang , Tianjie Ju , Sufeng Duan , Gongshen Liu

The development of Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) has significantly improved multi-step reasoning capabilities, but it has also made hallucination problems more frequent and harder to eliminate. While existing approaches mitigate…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Haolang Lu , Yilian Liu , Jingxin Xu , Guoshun Nan , Yuanlong Yu , Zhican Chen , Kun Wang

Mitigating reward hacking--where AI systems misbehave due to flaws or misspecifications in their learning objectives--remains a key challenge in constructing capable and aligned models. We show that we can monitor a frontier reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Bowen Baker , Joost Huizinga , Leo Gao , Zehao Dou , Melody Y. Guan , Aleksander Madry , Wojciech Zaremba , Jakub Pachocki , David Farhi

Backdoor attacks pose a serious threat to the security of large language models (LLMs), causing them to exhibit anomalous behavior under specific trigger conditions. The design of backdoor triggers has evolved from fixed triggers to dynamic…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Haotian Jin , Yang Li , Haihui Fan , Lin Shen , Xiangfang Li , Bo Li

Large reasoning models with reasoning capabilities achieve state-of-the-art performance on complex tasks, but their robustness under multi-turn adversarial pressure remains underexplored. We evaluate nine frontier reasoning models under…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yubo Li , Ramayya Krishnan , Rema Padman

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) 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

Deploying LLM-based agents in real-life applications often faces a critical challenge: the misalignment between agents' behavior and user intent. Such misalignment may lead agents to unintentionally execute critical actions that carry…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Haishuo Fang , Xiaodan Zhu , Iryna Gurevych

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive mathematical reasoning capabilities, yet their performance remains brittle to minor variations in problem description and prompting strategy. Furthermore, reasoning is vulnerable to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Sam Silver , Jimin Sun , Ivan Zhang , Sara Hooker , Eddie Kim

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often suffer from overthinking, generating verbose reasoning traces that compromise both computational efficiency and interpretability. Unlike prior efforts that rely on global length-based rewards, we propose…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jialiang Hong , Taihang Zhen , Kai Chen , Jiaheng Liu , Junlan Feng , Wenpeng Zhu , Jing Huo , Yang Gao , Depeng Wang , Haitao Wan , Xi Yang , Boyan Wang , Fanyu Meng , Yuyao Zhang