Excessive Reasoning Attack on Reasoning LLMs
Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek-R1, exhibit strong performance on complex tasks through test-time inference scaling. However, prior studies have shown that these models often incur significant computational costs due to excessive reasoning, such as frequent switching between reasoning trajectories (e.g., underthinking) or redundant reasoning on simple questions (e.g., overthinking). In this work, we expose a novel threat: adversarial inputs can be crafted to exploit excessive reasoning behaviors and substantially increase computational overhead without compromising model utility. Therefore, we propose a novel loss framework consisting of three components: (1) Priority Cross-Entropy Loss, a modification of the standard cross-entropy objective that emphasizes key tokens by leveraging the autoregressive nature of LMs; (2) Excessive Reasoning Loss, which encourages the model to initiate additional reasoning paths during inference; and (3) Delayed Termination Loss, which is designed to extend the reasoning process and defer the generation of final outputs. We optimize and evaluate our attack for the GSM8K and ORCA datasets on DeepSeek-R1-Distill-LLaMA and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen. Empirical results demonstrate a 3x to 9x increase in reasoning length with comparable utility performance. Furthermore, our crafted adversarial inputs exhibit transferability, inducing computational overhead in o3-mini, o1-mini, DeepSeek-R1, and QWQ models.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
GSM8KSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
POT: Inducing Overthinking in LLMs via Black-Box Iterative Optimization
Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have substantially enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), enabling sophisticated problem-solving through explicit multi-step reasoning tra…
Stop Reasoning! When Multimodal LLM with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Meets Adversarial Image
Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) with a great ability of text and image understanding have received great attention. To achieve better reasoning with MLLMs, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been widely explored, which further…
Adversarial RobustnessMultimodal ReasoningVisual ReasoningChain-of-Thought Hijacking
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve task performance through extended inference-time reasoning. Although previous studies suggest that longer reasoning should lead to more robust safety behavior, we find evidence to th…
Rethinking Reasoning: A Survey on Reasoning-based Backdoors in LLMs
With the rise of advanced reasoning capabilities, large language models (LLMs) are receiving increasing attention. However, although reasoning improves LLMs' performance on downstream tasks, it also introduces new securi…
Divide and Conquer: A Hybrid Strategy Defeats Multimodal Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) are widely applied in various fields of society due to their powerful reasoning, understanding, and generation capabilities. However, the security issues associated with these models are beco…