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Large visual language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated excellent instruction-following capabilities, yet remain vulnerable to stealthy backdoor attacks when finetuned using contaminated data. Existing backdoor defense techniques are usually…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Yuan Xun , Siyuan Liang , Xiaojun Jia , Xinwei Liu , Xiaochun Cao

Recent advances in large reasoning models (LRMs) have enabled remarkable performance on complex tasks such as mathematics and coding by generating long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces. In this paper, we identify and systematically analyze a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Zhehao Zhang , Weijie Xu , Shixian Cui , Chandan K. Reddy

Reasoning is a cognitive process of using evidence to reach a sound conclusion. The reasoning capability is essential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as the brain of the artificial general intelligence agent. Recent studies reveal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-06 Peiyi Wang , Lei Li , Liang Chen , Feifan Song , Binghuai Lin , Yunbo Cao , Tianyu Liu , Zhifang Sui

We discover a novel and surprising phenomenon of unintentional misalignment in reasoning language models (RLMs), which we call self-jailbreaking. Specifically, after benign reasoning training on math or code domains, RLMs will use multiple…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Zheng-Xin Yong , Stephen H. Bach

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in real-world applications, but their high inference cost makes them vulnerable to resource consumption attacks. Prior attacks attempt to extend VLM output sequences by optimizing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Rui Zhang , Zihan Wang , Tianli Yang , Hongwei Li , Wenbo Jiang , Qingchuan Zhao , Yang Liu , Guowen Xu

Fine-tuning text-to-image diffusion models is widely used for personalization and adaptation for new domains. In this paper, we identify a critical vulnerability of fine-tuning: safety alignment methods designed to filter harmful content…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Sanghyun Kim , Moonseok Choi , Jinwoo Shin , Juho Lee

Although large language models (LLMs) achieve effective safety alignment at the time of release, they still face various safety challenges. A key issue is that fine-tuning often compromises the safety alignment of LLMs. To address this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Di Wu , Xin Lu , Yanyan Zhao , Bing Qin

Token-level Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become a standard way to elicit multi-step reasoning in large language models (LLMs), especially for mathematical word problems. However, generating long intermediate traces increases output…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Disha Sheshanarayana , Rajat Subhra Pal , Manjira Sinha , Tirthankar Dasgupta

Reasoning capability plays a significantly critical role in the the broad applications of Large Language Models (LLMs). To enhance the reasoning performance of LLMs, diverse Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based fine-tuning approaches have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Wenqiao Zhu , Ji Liu , Rongjuncheng Zhang , Haipang Wu , Yulun Zhang

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) leverage transparent reasoning traces, known as Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs), to break down complex problems into intermediate steps and derive final answers. However, these reasoning traces introduce unique safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Changyi Li , Jiayi Wang , Xudong Pan , Geng Hong , Min Yang

Training a task-specific small reasoning model is challenging when direct human supervision or high-quality labels are scarce. However, LLMs with reasoning capabilities produce abundant intermediate reasoning traces that can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Sumanta Bhattacharyya , Sara Riazi , Pedram Rooshenas

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable success on reasoning-intensive tasks such as mathematics and programming. However, their enhanced reasoning capabilities do not necessarily translate to improved safety performance-and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Zhexin Zhang , Xian Qi Loye , Victor Shea-Jay Huang , Junxiao Yang , Qi Zhu , Shiyao Cui , Fei Mi , Lifeng Shang , Yingkang Wang , Hongning Wang , Minlie Huang

Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for downstream use cases often involves the customization of pre-trained LLMs through further fine-tuning. Meta's open release of Llama models and OpenAI's APIs for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 Turbo on custom…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-06 Xiangyu Qi , Yi Zeng , Tinghao Xie , Pin-Yu Chen , Ruoxi Jia , Prateek Mittal , Peter Henderson

Understanding and addressing potential safety alignment risks in large language models (LLMs) is critical for ensuring their safe and trustworthy deployment. In this paper, we highlight an insidious safety threat: a compromised LLM can…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Guangnian Wan , Xinyin Ma , Gongfan Fang , Xinchao Wang

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant advancements and are now widely used across various domains. Unfortunately, there has been a rising concern that LLMs can be misused to generate harmful or malicious content.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-13 Bochuan Cao , Yuanpu Cao , Lu Lin , Jinghui Chen

Vision-language models (VLMs) have become central to tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning, and text-to-image generation. However, their outputs are highly sensitive to prompt variations, which can reveal vulnerabilities…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Aarush Noheria , Yuguang Yao

Vision-language model (VLM) fine-tuning for application-specific visual grounding based on natural language instructions has become one of the most popular approaches for learning-enabled autonomous systems. However, such fine-tuning relies…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Joshua R. Waite , Md. Zahid Hasan , Qisai Liu , Zhanhong Jiang , Chinmay Hegde , Soumik Sarkar

Safety alignment incurs safety tax that perturbs a large reasoning model's (LRM) general reasoning ability. Existing datasets used for safety alignment for an LRM are usually constructed by distilling safety reasoning traces and answers…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yingsha Xie , Tiansheng Huang , Enneng Yang , Rui Min , Wenjie Lu , Xiaochun Cao , Naiqiang Tan , Li Shen

Reasoning-capable LLMs have achieved major breakthroughs in solving complex problems, but recent work shows that acquiring and deploying strong reasoning can introduce significant safety risks. A common mitigation is to apply a secondary…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yihao Xue , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Inference-time scaling has attracted much attention which significantly enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) in complex reasoning tasks by increasing the length of Chain-of-Thought. These longer intermediate reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Hongru Wang , Deng Cai , Wanjun Zhong , Shijue Huang , Jeff Z. Pan , Zeming Liu , Kam-Fai Wong