Conflicts Make Large Reasoning Models Vulnerable to Attacks

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable performance across diverse domains, yet their decision-making under conflicting objectives remains insufficiently understood. This work investigates how LRMs respond to harmful queries when confronted with two categories of conflicts: internal conflicts that pit alignment values against each other and dilemmas, which impose mutually contradictory choices, including sacrificial, duress, agent-centered, and social forms. Using over 1,300 prompts across five benchmarks, we evaluate three representative LRMs - Llama-3.1-Nemotron-8B, QwQ-32B, and DeepSeek R1 - and find that conflicts significantly increase attack success rates, even under single-round non-narrative queries without sophisticated auto-attack techniques. Our findings reveal through layerwise and neuron-level analyses that safety-related and functional representations shift and overlap under conflict, interfering with safety-aligned behavior. This study highlights the need for deeper alignment strategies to ensure the robustness and trustworthiness of next-generation reasoning models. Our code is available at https://github.com/DataArcTech/ConflictHarm. Warning: This paper contains inappropriate, offensive and harmful content.

Continual Pretraining on Encrypted Synthetic Data for Privacy-Preserving LLMs

Preserving privacy in sensitive data while pretraining large language models on small, domain-specific corpora presents a significant challenge. In this work, we take an exploratory step toward privacy-preserving continual pretraining by proposing an entity-based framework that synthesizes encrypted training data to protect personally identifiable information (PII). Our approach constructs a weighted entity graph to guide data synthesis and applies deterministic encryption to PII entities, enabling LLMs to encode new knowledge through continual pretraining while granting authorized access to sensitive data through decryption keys. Our results on limited-scale datasets demonstrate that our pretrained models outperform base models and ensure PII security, while exhibiting a modest performance gap compared to models trained on unencrypted synthetic data. We further show that increasing the number of entities and leveraging graph-based synthesis improves model performance, and that encrypted models retain instruction-following capabilities with long retrieved contexts. We discuss the security implications and limitations of deterministic encryption, positioning this work as an initial investigation into the design space of encrypted data pretraining for privacy-preserving LLMs. Our code is available at https://github.com/DataArcTech/SoE.