Related papers: NEST: Nascent Encoded Steganographic Thoughts

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:…

Monitoring the chain-of-thought (CoT) of reasoning models is a promising approach for detecting covert misbehavior (i.e., hidden objectives) in code generation tasks. While large models (GPT-5, Gemini-3-Flash) can serve as effective CoT…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex tasks by engaging in extended reasoning before producing final answers. Beyond improving abilities, these detailed reasoning traces also create a new…

Large language models (LLMs) are typically constrained to reason in the language space, where they express the reasoning process through a chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve complex problems. However, the language space may not always be…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT…

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…

Nowadays, organizations collect vast quantities of sensitive information in `Enterprise Resource Planning' (ERP) systems, such as accounting relevant transactions, customer master data, or strategic sales price information. The leakage of…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to move beyond fast System-1 responses and engage in deliberative System-2 reasoning. However, this comes at the cost of significant inefficiency due to verbose…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting boosts Large Language Models accuracy on multi-step tasks, yet whether the generated "thoughts" reflect the true internal reasoning process is unresolved. We present the first feature-level causal study of…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model's CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effectiveness of such monitoring hinges on CoTs faithfully…

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…

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…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a de-facto standard technique to elicit reasoning-like responses from large language models (LLMs), allowing them to spell out individual steps before giving a final answer. While the resemblance to…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduce new opportunities for safety monitoring through their Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, CoT is not always faithful to the model's final output, undermining its reliability as a monitoring…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities across a wide range of tasks, but data contamination undermines the objective evaluation of these capabilities. This problem is further exacerbated by malicious…

Reasoning language models improve performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs), but this process can also increase harmful outputs in adversarial settings. In this work, we ask whether the long CoTs can be…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique has proven effective in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, the performance gains are inconsistent across different tasks, and the underlying…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit \textit{hallucinations}, generating factually incorrect or semantically irrelevant content in response to prompts. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can mitigate hallucinations by encouraging…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

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.,…