Machine Learning Algorithms & Natural Language Processing
Jul 11, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence
Overthinking Large Language Models: New DoS Threat to Reasoning Models Unveiled
The paper introduces a black‑box hierarchical genetic algorithm that automatically perturbs the logical structure of reasoning questions to induce excessive chain‑of‑thought in large language models, dramatically inflating output tokens (up to 26.1× on MATH) and creating a DoS‑style resource‑exhaustion attack, with extensive experiments across multiple models demonstrating the vulnerability and its transferability.
DoS attackLLMhierarchical genetic algorithm
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