Related papers: Thinking Wrong in Silence: Backdoor Attacks on Con…

Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the…

Reasoning is essential for effective communication and decision-making. While recent advances in LLMs and MLLMs have shown that incorporating explicit reasoning significantly improves understanding and generalization, reasoning in LSMs…

The deployment of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) in high-stakes decision-making pipelines has introduced a novel and opaque attack surface: reasoning backdoors. In these attacks, the model's intermediate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is manipulated…

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning abilities, while smaller models (<= 3B parameters) significantly underperform on multi-step reasoning tasks. Based on empirical analyses of the Qwen-2.5 model…

Early research into data poisoning attacks against Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrated the ease with which backdoors could be injected. More recent LLMs add step-by-step reasoning, expanding the attack surface to include the…

Natural language processing (NLP) systems have been proven to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks, whereby hidden features (backdoors) are trained into a language model and may only be activated by specific inputs (called triggers), to trick…

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve superior performance through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but these token-level reasoning chains are computationally expensive and inefficient. In this paper, we introduce Compressed Latent…

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…

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…

Recent LLMs increasingly integrate reasoning mechanisms like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, this explicit reasoning exposes a new attack surface for inference-time backdoors, which inject malicious reasoning paths without altering model…

Emerging Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) consistently excel in mathematical and reasoning tasks, showcasing remarkable capabilities. However, the enhancement of reasoning abilities and the exposure of internal reasoning processes introduce…

Standard chain-of-thought reasoning generates a solution in a single forward pass, committing irrevocably to each token and lacking a mechanism to recover from early errors. We introduce Inference-Time Rethinking, a generative framework…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely integrated into interactive systems such as dialogue agents and task-oriented assistants. This growing ecosystem also raises supply-chain risks, where adversaries can distribute poisoned models that…

Deep neural networks have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Specifically, by injecting a small number of maliciously constructed inputs into the training set, an adversary is able to plant a backdoor into the trained…

We investigate the robustness of reasoning models trained for step-by-step problem solving by introducing query-agnostic adversarial triggers - short, irrelevant text that, when appended to math problems, systematically mislead models to…

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…

Recent studies show that neural natural language processing (NLP) models are vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Injected with backdoors, models perform normally on benign examples but produce attacker-specified predictions when the backdoor is…

Complex problems, whether in math, logic, or planning, are solved by humans through a sequence of steps where the result of one step informs the next. In this work, we adopt the perspective that the reasoning power of Transformers is…

With the widespread deployment of deep-learning-based speech models in security-critical applications, backdoor attacks have emerged as a serious threat: an adversary who poisons a small fraction of training data can implant a hidden…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) enhances an LLM's ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, but it also introduces new security issues. In this work, we present ShadowCoT, a novel backdoor attack framework that targets the internal reasoning…