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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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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'…
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…
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…
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…
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…