UnsafeChain: Enhancing Reasoning Model Safety via Hard Cases

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tomar, Raj Vardhan, Nakov, Preslav, Wang, Yuxia
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tomar, Raj Vardhan
Nakov, Preslav
Wang, Yuxia
author_facet Tomar, Raj Vardhan
Nakov, Preslav
Wang, Yuxia
contents As large reasoning models (LRMs) grow more capable, chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning introduces new safety challenges. Existing SFT-based safety alignment studies dominantly focused on filtering prompts with safe, high-quality responses, while overlooking hard prompts that always elicit harmful outputs. To fill this gap, we introduce UnsafeChain, a safety alignment dataset constructed from hard prompts with diverse sources, where unsafe completions are identified and explicitly corrected into safe responses. By exposing models to unsafe behaviors and guiding their correction, UnsafeChain enhances safety while preserving general reasoning ability. We fine-tune three LRMs on UnsafeChain and compare them against recent SafeChain and STAR-1 across six out-of-distribution and five in-distribution benchmarks. UnsafeChain consistently outperforms prior datasets, with even a 1K subset matching or surpassing baseline performance, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of correction-based supervision. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/UnsafeChain
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21652
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UnsafeChain: Enhancing Reasoning Model Safety via Hard Cases
Tomar, Raj Vardhan
Nakov, Preslav
Wang, Yuxia
Computation and Language
As large reasoning models (LRMs) grow more capable, chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning introduces new safety challenges. Existing SFT-based safety alignment studies dominantly focused on filtering prompts with safe, high-quality responses, while overlooking hard prompts that always elicit harmful outputs. To fill this gap, we introduce UnsafeChain, a safety alignment dataset constructed from hard prompts with diverse sources, where unsafe completions are identified and explicitly corrected into safe responses. By exposing models to unsafe behaviors and guiding their correction, UnsafeChain enhances safety while preserving general reasoning ability. We fine-tune three LRMs on UnsafeChain and compare them against recent SafeChain and STAR-1 across six out-of-distribution and five in-distribution benchmarks. UnsafeChain consistently outperforms prior datasets, with even a 1K subset matching or surpassing baseline performance, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of correction-based supervision. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/UnsafeChain
title UnsafeChain: Enhancing Reasoning Model Safety via Hard Cases
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21652