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Cats Confuse Reasoning LLM: Query-Agnostic Adversarial Triggers for Reasoning Models

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Paper Summary

Paperzilla title
Tricking AI with Nonsense: How Silly Sentences Make Math Models Go Bonkers

This paper demonstrates that adding short, irrelevant text snippets to math problems can dramatically increase the error rate of AI models, even without changing the problem's meaning. This vulnerability was shown across different AI models and problem difficulties, raising concerns about the reliability of reasoning models in real-world applications.

Explain Like I'm Five

Researchers tricked AI models into making mistakes on math problems by adding silly sentences. This shows how easily AI can get confused even without changing the actual problem.

Possible Conflicts of Interest

None identified

Identified Limitations

Proxy Model Bias
The choice of Deepseek V3 as a proxy model might introduce biases specific to that model family, limiting the generalizability of the discovered triggers.
Benchmark Limitation
The heavy reliance on the GSM8K benchmark, while common, might not fully capture the diversity and complexity of real-world mathematical problems.
Limited Defense Analysis
While the paper explores two common defense strategies, the lack of a comprehensive study on defense mechanisms limits the practical implications of the findings.

Rating Explanation

This paper presents a novel approach to adversarial attacks on reasoning LLMs, demonstrating the vulnerability of these models to subtle, query-agnostic triggers. The automated attack pipeline and the demonstration of cross-family transferability are significant contributions. Despite some limitations in proxy model choice and benchmark coverage, the findings highlight important security and reliability concerns for reasoning models.

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File Information

Original Title: Cats Confuse Reasoning LLM: Query-Agnostic Adversarial Triggers for Reasoning Models
Uploaded: August 26, 2025 at 01:55 PM
Privacy: Public