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Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have become powerful tools for complex problem solving, but their structured reasoning pathways can lead to unsafe outputs when exposed to harmful prompts. Existing safety alignment methods reduce harmful…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Wonje Jeung , Sangyeon Yoon , Minsuk Kahng , Albert No

The safety of large language models (LLMs) has increasingly emerged as a fundamental aspect of their development. Existing safety alignment for LLMs is predominantly achieved through post-training methods, which are computationally…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Sicheng Shen , Mingyang Lv , Han Shen , Jialin Wu , Binghao Wang , Zhou Yang , Guobin Shen , Dongcheng Zhao , Feifei Zhao , Yi Zeng

Multimodal Large Reasoning Models (MLRMs) demonstrate impressive cross-modal reasoning but often amplify safety risks under adversarial or unsafe prompts, a phenomenon we call the \textit{Reasoning Tax}. Existing defenses mainly act at the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Huahui Yi , Kun Wang , Qiankun Li , Miao Yu , Liang Lin , Gongli Xi , Hao Wu , Xuming Hu , Kang Li , Yang Liu

Harnessing the power of LLMs requires a delicate dance between being helpful and harmless. This creates a fundamental tension between two competing challenges: vulnerability to adversarial attacks that elicit unsafe content, and a tendency…

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) pose critical safety challenges, as they are susceptible not only to adversarial attacks such as jailbreaking but also to inadvertently generating harmful content for benign users. While internal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ming Wen , Kun Yang , Xin Chen , Jingyu Zhang , Dingding Han , Shiwen Cui , Yuedong Xu

Human cognition, driven by complex neurochemical processes, oscillates between imagination and reality and learns to self-correct whenever such subtle drifts lead to hallucinations or unsafe associations. In recent years, LLMs have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Sharanya Dasgupta , Arkaprabha Basu , Sujoy Nath , Swagatam Das

While the wide adoption of refusal training in large language models (LLMs) has showcased improvements in model safety, recent works have highlighted shortcomings due to the shallow nature of these alignment methods. To this end, the work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Pankayaraj Pathmanathan , Furong Huang

Jailbreak attacks pose persistent threats to large language models (LLMs). Current safety alignment methods have attempted to address these issues, but they experience two significant limitations: insufficient safety alignment depth and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Yuanbo Xie , Yingjie Zhang , Tianyun Liu , Duohe Ma , Tingwen Liu

In recent years, safety risks associated with large language models have become increasingly prominent, highlighting the urgent need to mitigate the generation of toxic and harmful content. The mainstream paradigm for LLM safety alignment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Zhewen Tan , Wenhan Yu , Jianfeng Si , Tongxin Liu , Kaiqi Guan , Huiyan Jin , Jiawen Tao , Xiaokun Yuan , Duohe Ma , Xiangzheng Zhang , Tong Yang , Lin Sun

Large reasoning models (LRMs) "think" by generating structured chain-of-thought (CoT) before producing a final answer, yet they still lack the ability to reason critically about safety alignment and are easily biased when a flawed premise…

End-to-end autonomous driving systems excel in common scenarios but struggle with safety-critical long-tail cases. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models are promising due to their strong reasoning capabilities. However, most VLA-based…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Kefei Tian , Yuansheng Lian , Kai Yang , Xiangdong Chen , Shen Li

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has significantly advanced reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but such signals remain coarse, offering only binary correctness feedback. This limitation often results in inefficiencies,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Peixuan Han , Adit Krishnan , Gerald Friedland , Jiaxuan You , Chris Kong

Recent advances in reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are largely driven by reinforcement learning (RL), yet the underlying parameter dynamics during RL training remain poorly understood. This work identifies two…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Yuchen Cai , Ding Cao , Xin Xu , Zijun Yao , Yuqing Huang , Zhenyu Tan , Benyi Zhang , Guangzhong Sun , Guiquan Liu , Junfeng Fang

Small Language Models (SLMs) are a cost-effective alternative to Large Language Models (LLMs), but often struggle with complex reasoning due to their limited capacity and a tendency to produce mistakes or inconsistent answers during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Yuanfeng Xu , Zehui Dai , Jian Liang , Jiapeng Guan , Guangrun Wang , Liang Lin , Xiaohui Lv

Alignment is vital for safely deploying large language models (LLMs). Existing techniques are either reward-based (training a reward model on preference pairs and optimizing with reinforcement learning) or reward-free (directly fine-tuning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Ruoxi Cheng , Haoxuan Ma , Weixin Wang , Ranjie Duan , Jiexi Liu , Xiaoshuang Jia , Simeng Qin , Xiaochun Cao , Yang Liu , Xiaojun Jia

Reinforcement learning (RL) commonly relies on scalar rewards with limited ability to express temporal, conditional, or safety-critical goals, and can lead to reward hacking. Temporal logic expressible via the more general class of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Dominik Wagner , Leon Witzman , Luke Ong

Autonomous highway driving demands a critical balance between proactive, efficiency-seeking behavior and robust safety guarantees. This paper proposes Language Action-guided Reinforcement Learning (LA-RL) with Safety Guarantees, a novel…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-08 Yiming Shu , Jiahui Xu , Jiwei Tang , Ruiyang Gao , Chen Sun

Scaling test-time computation with reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a reliable path to improve large language models (LLM) reasoning ability. Yet, outcome-based reward often incentivizes models to be overconfident, leading to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Liaoyaqi Wang , Chunsheng Zuo , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Anqi Liu

Reinforcement learning based fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) on human preferences has been shown to enhance both their capabilities and safety behavior. However, in cases related to safety, without precise instructions to human…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tong Mu , Alec Helyar , Johannes Heidecke , Joshua Achiam , Andrea Vallone , Ian Kivlichan , Molly Lin , Alex Beutel , John Schulman , Lilian Weng

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a standard paradigm for refining large language models (LLMs) beyond pre-training and instruction tuning. A prominent line of work is RL with verifiable rewards (RLVR), which leverages automatically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Bonan Zhang , Zhongqi Chen , Bowen Song , Qinya Li , Fan Wu , Guihai Chen