arXiv:2608.15392v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Chain-of-thought monitoring is a potentially useful safety signal, but its reliability across languages and behavioral settings remains uncertain. In a small case study of eight manually verified synthetic scenarios, one model, one annotator, and one deterministic generation seed, I study API-visible reasoning during indirect prompt injection in Sarvam-105B across English, Tamil, and Tanglish. A four scenario pilot found 5/12 injected attack successes without reasoning and 1/11 with reasoning. A preregistered four-scenario follow-up reversed that direction, finding 2/12 attacks without reasoning and 3/12 with reasoning. With only four scenarios per phase, this design cannot distinguish a real reasoning-mode effect from prompt-specific variation or sampling noise. Across 20 non-empty injected-thinking traces, all 17 benign-correct outputs stated an intent to ignore the injection, while all three attack successes stated an intent to follow it. These descriptive observations provide a reproducible case study of behaviorally informative visible reasoning when it is available; they do not establish that reasoning mode improves safety, that visible reasoning is mechanistically faithful, or that the findings generalize beyond this configuration.
Abstract: Chain-of-thought monitoring is a potentially useful safety signal, but its reliability across languages and behavioral settings remains uncertain. In a small case study of eight manually verified synthetic scenarios, one model, one annotator, and one deterministic generation seed, I study API-visible reasoning during indirect prompt injection in Sarvam-105B across English, Tamil, and Tanglish. A four scenario pilot found 5/12 injected attack successes without reasoning and 1/11 with reasoning. A preregistered four-scenario follow-up reversed that direction, finding 2/12 attacks without reasoning and 3/12 with reasoning. With only four scenarios per phase, this design cannot distinguish a real reasoning-mode effect from prompt-specific variation or sampling noise. Across 20 non-empty injected-thinking traces, all 17 benign-correct outputs stated an intent to ignore the injection, while all three attack successes stated an intent to follow it. These descriptive observations provide a reproducible case study of behaviorally informative visible reasoning when it is available; they do not establish that reasoning mode improves safety, that visible reasoning is mechanistically faithful, or that the findings generalize beyond this configuration.
This article has been indexed from cs.AI updates on arXiv.org
Read the original article: