ACL 2025finding0 citations
Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Really Reduce Harmfulness from Jailbreaking?
Chengda Lu, Xiaoyu Fan, Yu Huang, Rongwu Xu, Jijie Li, Wei Xu
Abstract
Jailbreak attacks have been observed to largely fail against recent reasoning models enhanced by Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, the underlying mechanism remains underexplored, and relying solely on reasoning capacity may raise security concerns. In this paper, we try to answer the question: Does CoT reasoning really reduce harmfulness from jailbreaking? Through rigorous theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that CoT reasoning has dual effects on jailbreaking harmfulness. Based on the theoretical insights, we propose a novel jailbreak method, FicDetail, whose practical performance validates our theoretical findings.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{lu-etal-2025-chain,
title = "Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Really Reduce Harmfulness from Jailbreaking?",
author = "Lu, Chengda and
Fan, Xiaoyu and
Huang, Yu and
Xu, Rongwu and
Li, Jijie and
Xu, Wei",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.339/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.339",
pages = "6523--6546",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5"
}