Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) augmented with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning demonstrate impressive problem-solving abilities. However, in this work, we identify a recurring issue where these models occasionally generate overly short reasoning, leading to degraded performance on even simple mathematical problems. Specifically, we investigate how reasoning length is embedded in the hidden representations of reasoning models and its impact on accuracy. Our analysis reveals that reasoning length is governed by a linear direction in the representation space, allowing us to induce overly short reasoning by steering the model along this direction. Building on this insight, we introduce ThinkEdit, a simple yet effective weight-editing approach to mitigate the issue of overly short reasoning. We first identify a small subset of attention heads (approximately 4%) that predominantly drive short reasoning behavior. We then edit the output projection weights of these heads to remove the short reasoning direction. With changes to only 0.2% of the model’s parameters, ThinkEdit effectively reduces overly short reasoning and yields notable accuracy gains for short reasoning outputs (+6.39%), along with an overall improvement across multiple math benchmarks (+3.34%). Our findings provide new mechanistic insights into how reasoning length is controlled within LLMs and highlight the potential of fine-grained model interventions to improve reasoning quality.

Recent research has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated jailbreak attacks, where adversarial suffixes crafted by algorithms appended to harmful queries bypass safety alignment and trigger unintended responses. Current methods for generating these suffixes are computationally expensive and have low Attack Success Rates (ASR), especially against well-aligned models like Llama2 and Llama3. To overcome these limitations, we introduce **ADV-LLM**, an iterative self-tuning process that crafts adversarial LLMs with enhanced jailbreak ability. Our framework significantly reduces the computational cost of generating adversarial suffixes while achieving nearly 100% ASR on various open-source LLMs. Moreover, it exhibits strong attack transferability to closed-source models, achieving 99% ASR on GPT-3.5 and 49% ASR on GPT-4, despite being optimized solely on Llama3. Beyond improving jailbreak ability, ADV-LLM provides valuable insights for future safety alignment research through its ability to generate large datasets for studying LLM safety.