Rui Pu, Chaozhuo Li Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Rui Ha Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Litian Zhang Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, Lirong Qiu Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Xi Zhang Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Defending large language models (LLMs) against jailbreak attacks is essential for their safe and reliable deployment. Existing defenses often rely on shallow pattern matching, which struggles to generalize to novel and unseen attack strategies. To address this challenge, we propose the Cognitive-Driven Defense (CDD) framework, which targets the underlying structure of jailbreak prompts by applying meta-operations, defined as basic manipulations that conceal harmful intent. CDD emulates human cognitive reasoning through a structured reasoning chain. It begins with a global perception of the prompt and follows with a localized analysis to uncover hidden manipulations. By applying supervised fine-tuning on this structured chain, the model learns to identify and reason about known manipulation patterns. To enhance generalization to unseen threats, an entropy-guided reinforcement learning algorithm (EG-GRPO) is introduced to encourage exploration of new types and variants of meta-operations. Experiments demonstrate that CDD can achieve state-of-the-art defense performance and exhibit strong generalization to unseen jailbreak attacks.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Rui Ha Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Rui Pu, Chaozhuo Li Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Li Sun Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications, Sen Su Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking. As a result, LRMs continue generating redundant reasoning even after reaching high-confidence conclusions. This increases inference cost and latency, limiting practical deployment. The root cause is the absence of an intrinsic mechanism to monitor the reasoning state and decide when to continue, backtrack, or stop. We propose MERA, a meta-cognitive reasoning framework that decouples reasoning from control to enable independent optimization of control strategies. MERA constructs high-quality reasoning–control supervision data via a takeover-based pipeline, and transforms long-horizon traces into structured reasoning–control alternating sequences for training. The model is trained with supervised fine-tuning to internalize the structured separation, and further optimized with Control-Segment Policy Optimization (CSPO), which combines segment-wise GRPO with control masking to focus learning on control segments. Experiments across reasoning benchmarks show that MERA improves both efficiency and accuracy.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表