Alignment of LRMs via Counter-Aligned Few-Shot Conversation Exposure
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) rely on explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and large context windows to achieve strong performance on complex tasks, but these features also introduce new attack surfaces. We show that LRMs' reasoning processes can be systematically steered by prepending counter-aligned few-shot conversations containing explicit CoT traces, leading to unsafe generations on harmful queries and unwarranted refusals on benign ones. We formalize this attack as SRCF (Steering Reasoning via Counter-Aligned Few-shot Conversations) that operates solely through a flexible conversational interface and requires no access to the model's parameters and gradients. Our key insight is...
| Authors | Xiangyu Zhou, Saleh Zare Zade, Dongxiao Zhu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 16 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 16 August 2026 |
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