Satya Sai Srinath Namburi GNVV
Author directory2026
Does Reasoning Preserve Alignment? On the Trustworthiness of Large Reasoning Models
Prajakta Kini | Avinash Reddy | Souradip Chakraborty | Satya Sai Srinath Namburi GNVV | Furong Huang | Amrit Singh Bedi | Alvaro Velasquez
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Prajakta Kini | Avinash Reddy | Souradip Chakraborty | Satya Sai Srinath Namburi GNVV | Furong Huang | Amrit Singh Bedi | Alvaro Velasquez
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Instruction-tuned LLMs are increasingly converted into reasoning models through post-training to improve multi-step task performance. This conversion is usually optimized for reasoning accuracy, without explicitly preserving the instruction-tuned model’s alignment behavior, such as safe refusal, bias avoidance, and privacy protection. We ask: does this conversion preserve alignment? We study this question through a trustworthiness audit and find that it is not behavior-preserving by default. For a systematic analysis, we compare reasoning models produced via supervised fine-tuning, RL-based post-training, and distillation against matched instruction-tuned baselines across six trustworthiness dimensions: safety, toxicity, stereotyping and bias, machine ethics, privacy, and out-of-distribution robustness. We observe that reasoning models often improve on mathematical reasoning benchmarks but exhibit alignment regressions, including increased toxicity, amplified stereotyping, miscalibrated refusal, and contextual privacy leakage. These regressions are consistent with behavioral drift from the instruction-tuned baseline, measured by KL divergence. Our results show that reasoning-model releases should report trustworthiness metrics alongside capability gains.