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Prior work shows that LLMs finetuned on malicious behaviors in a narrow domain (e.g., writing insecure code) can become broadly misaligned -- a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. We investigate whether this extends from conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 James Chua , Jan Betley , Mia Taylor , Owain Evans

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting assumes that generated reasoning reflects a model's internal computation. We show this assumption is wrong in a specific, measurable way: models internally detect their own reasoning errors but outwardly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Aojie Yuan , Zhiyuan Julian Su , Haiyue Zhang , Yi Nian , Yue Zhao

As AI models are deployed with increasing autonomy, it is important to ensure they do not take harmful actions unnoticed. As a potential mitigation, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring, wherein a weaker trusted monitor model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Benjamin Arnav , Pablo Bernabeu-Pérez , Nathan Helm-Burger , Tim Kostolansky , Hannes Whittingham , Mary Phuong

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning has demonstrated remarkable deep reasoning capabilities in both large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, its reliability is often undermined by the accumulation of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Zijun Chen , Wenbo Hu , Richang Hong

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly rely on step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to improve task performance, particularly in high-resource languages such as English. While recent work has examined final-answer accuracy in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Raoyuan Zhao , Yihong Liu , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Tianqiao Liu , Zui Chen , Zitao Liu , Mi Tian , Weiqi Luo

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning not only enhances large language model performance but also provides critical insights into decision-making processes, marking it as a useful tool for monitoring model intent and planning. However, recent…

Despite their strengths, large language models (LLMs) often fail to communicate their confidence accurately, making it difficult to assess when they might be wrong and limiting their reliability. In this work, we demonstrate that reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Dongkeun Yoon , Seungone Kim , Sohee Yang , Sunkyoung Kim , Soyeon Kim , Yongil Kim , Eunbi Choi , Yireun Kim , Minjoon Seo

Large language models increasingly rely on explicit chain-of-thought reasoning to solve complex tasks, yet the safety of the reasoning process itself remains largely unaddressed. Existing work focuses predominantly on content safety (i.e.,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Xunguang Wang , Yuguang Zhou , Qingyue Wang , Zongjie Li , Ruixuan Huang , Zhenlan Ji , Pingchuan Ma , Shuai Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is useful for monitoring language models only when the reasoning trace faithfully reflects the computation that produces the final answer. However, models can rely on prompt-to-answer shortcuts that bypass…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinghan Jia , Joe Benton , Eric Easley

As AI systems approach dangerous capability levels where inability safety cases become insufficient, we need alternative approaches to ensure safety. This paper presents a roadmap for constructing safety cases based on chain-of-thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Julian Schulz

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become central to mathematical reasoning in large language models, yet models remain brittle to early errors: a single arithmetic slip or unjustified inference typically propagates uncorrected to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Saraswathy Amjith , Mihika Dusad , Neha Muramalla , Shweta Shah

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a foundational technique for eliciting reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the robustness of this approach to corruptions in intermediate reasoning steps remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Ashwath Vaithinathan Aravindan , Mayank Kejriwal

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced state-of-the-art AI capabilities. However, recent studies have shown that CoT reasoning is not always faithful when models face an explicit bias in their prompts, i.e., the CoT can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Iván Arcuschin , Jett Janiak , Robert Krzyzanowski , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Neel Nanda , Arthur Conmy

Large language models are typically trained on vast amounts of data during the pre-training phase, which may include some potentially harmful information. Fine-tuning attacks can exploit this by prompting the model to reveal such…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Zhiyuan Xu , Joseph Gardiner , Sana Belguith

Chain-of-thought (CoT) outputs let us read a model's step-by-step reasoning. Since any long, serial reasoning process must pass through this textual trace, the quality of the CoT is a direct window into what the model is thinking. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Austin Meek , Eitan Sprejer , Iván Arcuschin , Austin J. Brockmeier , Steven Basart

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

As chain-of-thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kyle Cox , Darius Kianersi , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yufeng Zhang , Xuepeng Wang , Lingxiang Wu , Jinqiao Wang