Towards Safer Large Reasoning Models by Promoting Safety Decision-Making before Chain-of-Thought Generation
Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieved remarkable performance via chain-of-thought (CoT), but recent studies showed that such enhanced reasoning capabilities are at the expense of significantly degraded safety capabilities. In this paper, we reveal that LRMs' safety degradation occurs only after CoT is enabled, and this degradation is not observed when CoT is disabled. This observation motivates us to consider encouraging LRMs to make safety decisions before CoT generation. To this end, we propose a novel safety alignment method that promotes the safety decision-making of LRMs before starting CoT generation. Specifically, we first utilize a Bert-based classifier to extract safety decision...
| Authors | Jianan Chen, Zhifang Zhang, Shuo He et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 18 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 3 May 2026 |
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