Benchmarking Gaslighting Negation Attacks Against Reasoning Models

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Hauptverfasser: Zhu, Bin, Yin, Hailong, Chen, Jingjing, Jiang, Yu-Gang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhu, Bin
Yin, Hailong
Chen, Jingjing
Jiang, Yu-Gang
author_facet Zhu, Bin
Yin, Hailong
Chen, Jingjing
Jiang, Yu-Gang
contents Recent advances in reasoning-centric models promise improved robustness through mechanisms such as chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling. However, their ability to withstand gaslighting negation attacks-adversarial prompts that confidently deny correct answers-remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic evaluation of three state-of-the-art reasoning models, i.e., OpenAI's o4-mini, Claude-3.7-Sonnet and Gemini-2.5-Flash, across three multimodal benchmarks: MMMU, MathVista, and CharXiv. Our evaluation reveals significant accuracy drops (25-29% on average) following gaslighting negation attacks, indicating that even top-tier reasoning models struggle to preserve correct answers under manipulative user feedback. Built upon the insights of the evaluation and to further probe this vulnerability, we introduce GaslightingBench-R, a new diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate reasoning models' susceptibility to defend their belief under gaslighting negation attacks. Constructed by filtering and curating 1,025 challenging samples from the existing benchmarks, GaslightingBench-R induces even more dramatic failures, with accuracy drops exceeding 53% on average. Our findings highlight a fundamental gap between step-by-step reasoning and resistance to adversarial manipulation, calling for new robustness strategies that safeguard reasoning models against gaslighting negation attacks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_09677
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmarking Gaslighting Negation Attacks Against Reasoning Models
Zhu, Bin
Yin, Hailong
Chen, Jingjing
Jiang, Yu-Gang
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Recent advances in reasoning-centric models promise improved robustness through mechanisms such as chain-of-thought prompting and test-time scaling. However, their ability to withstand gaslighting negation attacks-adversarial prompts that confidently deny correct answers-remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a systematic evaluation of three state-of-the-art reasoning models, i.e., OpenAI's o4-mini, Claude-3.7-Sonnet and Gemini-2.5-Flash, across three multimodal benchmarks: MMMU, MathVista, and CharXiv. Our evaluation reveals significant accuracy drops (25-29% on average) following gaslighting negation attacks, indicating that even top-tier reasoning models struggle to preserve correct answers under manipulative user feedback. Built upon the insights of the evaluation and to further probe this vulnerability, we introduce GaslightingBench-R, a new diagnostic benchmark specifically designed to evaluate reasoning models' susceptibility to defend their belief under gaslighting negation attacks. Constructed by filtering and curating 1,025 challenging samples from the existing benchmarks, GaslightingBench-R induces even more dramatic failures, with accuracy drops exceeding 53% on average. Our findings highlight a fundamental gap between step-by-step reasoning and resistance to adversarial manipulation, calling for new robustness strategies that safeguard reasoning models against gaslighting negation attacks.
title Benchmarking Gaslighting Negation Attacks Against Reasoning Models
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.09677