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Related papers: Refusal Falls off a Cliff: How Safety Alignment Fa…

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Long-context LLMs can infer objectives that are not stated explicitly. This capability is useful for reasoning over documents, code, retrieved evidence, and tool traces, but it also creates a safety risk: harmful intent can be distributed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Yu Fu , Haz Sameen Shahgir , Huanli Gong , Zhipeng Wei , N. Benjamin Erichson , Yue Dong

Although large reasoning models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities on complex tasks, recent studies reveal that these models frequently fulfill harmful user instructions, raising significant safety concerns. In this paper, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Yeonjun In , Wonjoong Kim , Sangwu Park , Chanyoung Park

The recent work by Shojaee et al. (2025), titled The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity, presents a compelling empirical finding, a reasoning cliff, where…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Sheraz Khan , Subha Madhavan , Kannan Natarajan

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks, yet they often refuse to answer legitimate queries--a phenomenon known as overrefusal. Overrefusal typically stems from over-conservative…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-18 Licheng Pan , Yongqi Tong , Xin Zhang , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Zhixuan Chu

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

Large language models (LLMs) often improve their performance in downstream tasks when they generate Chain of Thought reasoning text before producing an answer. We investigate how LLMs recover from errors in Chain of Thought. Through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-04 Evelyn Yee , Alice Li , Chenyu Tang , Yeon Ho Jung , Ramamohan Paturi , Leon Bergen

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve remarkable performance by leveraging reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning tasks to generate long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this over-optimization often prioritizes compliance,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Seanie Lee , Sangwoo Park , Yumin Choi , Gyeongman Kim , Minki Kang , Jihun Yun , Dongmin Park , Jongho Park , Sung Ju Hwang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly expose chain-of-thought-like reasoning for transparency, verification, and deliberate problem solving. This creates a safety blind spot: harmful or policy-violating content may appear in reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Xiaomin Li , Jianheng Hou , Zheyuan Deng , Zhiwei Zhang , Taoran Li , Binghang Lu , Bing Hu , Yunhan Zhao , Yuexing Hao

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse domains, yet their decision-making under conflicting objectives remains insufficiently understood. This work investigates how LRMs respond to harmful queries…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Honghao Liu , Chengjin Xu , Xuhui Jiang , Cehao Yang , Shengming Yin , Zhengwu Ma , Lionel Ni , Jian Guo

Ensuring the safety and harmlessness of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become equally critical as their performance in applications. However, existing safety alignment methods typically suffer from safety-performance trade-offs and the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 Yichi Zhang , Siyuan Zhang , Yao Huang , Zeyu Xia , Zhengwei Fang , Xiao Yang , Ranjie Duan , Dong Yan , Yinpeng Dong , Jun Zhu

Reasoning models are evaluated on single-turn benchmarks but deployed in multi-turn dialogue, where users push back on correct answers. Under sustained adversarial pressure we find a previously undocumented failure mode: the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yubo Li , Ramayya Krishnan , Rema Padman

Refusals - instances where large language models (LLMs) decline or fail to fully execute user instructions - are crucial for both AI safety and AI capabilities and the reduction of hallucinations in particular. These behaviors are learned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Alexander von Recum , Christoph Schnabl , Gabor Hollbeck , Silas Alberti , Philip Blinde , Marvin von Hagen

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks requiring complex reasoning, such as code generation, mathematical problem solving, and algorithmic synthesis -- especially when aided by reasoning tokens and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Jaechul Roh , Varun Gandhi , Shivani Anilkumar , Arin Garg

Current alignment evaluation mostly measures whether models encode dangerous concepts and whether they refuse harmful requests. Both miss the layer where alignment often operates: routing from concept detection to behavioral policy. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Gregory N. Frank

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex problem-solving through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, the multi-step nature of CoT introduces new safety challenges that extend beyond…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zihao Zhu , Xinyu Wu , Gehan Hu , Siwei Lyu , Ke Xu , Baoyuan Wu

Large language models (LLMs) are typically aligned to refuse harmful instructions through safety fine-tuning. A recent attack, termed abliteration, identifies and suppresses the single latent direction most responsible for refusal behavior,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Harethah Abu Shairah , Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Bernard Ghanem , George Turkiyyah

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly advanced performance on complex tasks, yet their tendency to overthink introduces inefficiencies. This study investigates the internal mechanisms of reinforcement learning (RL)-trained LRMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rongzhi Zhu , Yi Liu , Zequn Sun , Yiwei Wang , Wei Hu

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-21 Parshin Shojaee , Iman Mirzadeh , Keivan Alizadeh , Maxwell Horton , Samy Bengio , Mehrdad Farajtabar

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks typically exhibit a fundamental safety-capability tradeoff, where improving task performance degrades safety alignment even on benign datasets. This degradation persists across…

Although Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have progressed in solving complex problems, their chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning often contains harmful content that can persist even when the final responses appear safe. We show that this issue…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Yichi Zhang , Yue Ding , Jingwen Yang , Tianwei Luo , Dongbai Li , Ranjie Duan , Qiang Liu , Hang Su , Yinpeng Dong , Jun Zhu