Red Teaming Large Reasoning Models

Jiawei Chen, Yang Yang, Chao Yu, Yu Tian, Zhi Cao, Xue Yang, Linghao Li, Hang Su, Zhaoxia Yin


Abstract
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have emerged as a powerful advancement in multi-step reasoning tasks, offering enhanced transparency and logical consistency through explicit chains of thought (CoT). However, these models introduce novel safety and reliability risks, such as CoT-hijacking and prompt-induced inefficiencies, which are not fully captured by existing evaluation methods. To address this gap, we propose Rt-LRM, a unified benchmark designed to assess the trustworthiness of LRMs. Rt-LRM evaluates three core dimensions: truthfulness, safety and efficiency. Beyond metric-based evaluation, we further introduce the training paradigm as a key analytical perspective to investigate the systematic impact of different training strategies on model trustworthiness. We achieve this by designing a curated suite of 30 reasoning tasks from an observational standpoint. We conduct extensive experiments on 26 models and identify several valuable insights into the trustworthiness of LRMs. For example, LRMs generally face trustworthiness challenges and tend to be more fragile than Large Language Models (LLMs) when encountering reasoning-induced risks. These findings uncover previously underexplored vulnerabilities and highlight the need for more targeted evaluations. In addition, we release a scalable toolbox for standardized trustworthiness research to support future advancements in this important field.
Anthology ID:
2026.acl-long.1034
Volume:
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22559–22591
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1034/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiawei Chen, Yang Yang, Chao Yu, Yu Tian, Zhi Cao, Xue Yang, Linghao Li, Hang Su, and Zhaoxia Yin. 2026. Red Teaming Large Reasoning Models. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 22559–22591, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Red Teaming Large Reasoning Models (Chen et al., ACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.1034.pdf
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 2026.acl-long.1034.checklist.pdf