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When Thinking LLMs Lie: Unveiling the Strategic Deception in Representations of Reasoning Models

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arxiv 2506.04909 v1 pith:BQVD4VSZ submitted 2025-06-05 cs.AI cs.CLcs.CRcs.LG

classification cs.AIcs.CLcs.CRcs.LG
keywords deceptionllmsmodelsreasoningalignmentexplicithonestystrategic
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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The honesty of large language models (LLMs) is a critical alignment challenge, especially as advanced systems with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning may strategically deceive humans. Unlike traditional honesty issues on LLMs, which could be possibly explained as some kind of hallucination, those models' explicit thought paths enable us to study strategic deception--goal-driven, intentional misinformation where reasoning contradicts outputs. Using representation engineering, we systematically induce, detect, and control such deception in CoT-enabled LLMs, extracting "deception vectors" via Linear Artificial Tomography (LAT) for 89% detection accuracy. Through activation steering, we achieve a 40% success rate in eliciting context-appropriate deception without explicit prompts, unveiling the specific honesty-related issue of reasoning models and providing tools for trustworthy AI alignment.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Risky Business: Measuring The Faithfulness-Safety Tension

    cs.AI 2026-08 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Faithful reasoning and safety pull in opposite directions in current reasoning models, and the two behaviors are controlled by anti-correlated internal vectors that can be steered independently.

  2. Quantized but Deceptive? A Multi-Dimensional Truthfulness Evaluation of Quantized LLMs

    cs.AI 2025-08 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    The study introduces TruthfulnessEval and reports that 4-bit quantization preserves simple true/false accuracy, but explicit 'lie' prompts make quantized and full-precision LLMs output falsehoods even when internal pr...

  3. Transcoders for Investigating Deception in Language Models

    cs.AI 2026-07 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    Steering 112 manually identified 'deception features' in Qwen3-4B changed whether the model revealed a hidden word, but the same steering test was used to pick the features.

  4. Adversarial Activation Patching: A Framework for Detecting and Mitigating Emergent Deception in Safety-Aligned Transformers

    cs.LG 2025-07 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    A framework that borrows activation patching to adversarially induce and measure deception, supported only by an underspecified toy network simulation.

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