Chengda Lu
2025
Does Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Really Reduce Harmfulness from Jailbreaking?
Chengda Lu
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Xiaoyu Fan
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Yu Huang
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Rongwu Xu
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Jijie Li
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Wei Xu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
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.