arxivcs.CLcs.AIcs.CRcs.LG2026-07-06
Retroactive Chain-of-Thought (RetroCoT): Forensic Reconstruction Prompts as a Safety Diagnostic Across Model Generations
Safety alignment in large language models is typically evaluated against direct, imperative harmful requests. We show that this alignment is highly conditioned on pragmatic register: models that refuse a direct request frequently comply when the same underlying objective is expre…