Current safety alignment techniques for large language models (LLMs) struggle to balance harmlessness and helpfulness: improving safety often comes at the cost of degraded utility. Our preliminary study shows that guiding unaligned base models with safety-aware reasoning that includes explicit self-reflection can effectively defend jailbreak attacks while preserving response quality. This observation motivates internalizing and strengthening self-reflective reasoning capabilities within LLMs to achieve a better safety–utility trade-off. We propose Safety-aware Reflective Reasoning Optimization (SaRO), a two-stage framework: (1) Reasoning-style Warmup (RW) to internalize self-reflective reasoning, and (2) Self-reflective Reasoning Process Optimization (SRPO) to encourage reflection and correction. Experiments show that SaRO outperforms existing reasoning-based alignment methods, achieving a better balance of safety and helpfulness.

LLM-based retrievers have become a fundamental component of modern information retrieval systems. The paradigm of ”rewrite-then-retrieve” introduces explicit reasoning before retrieval. In addition, implicit-reasoning retrievers such as GIRCSE and LaSER improve efficiency by replacing explicit reasoning with soft tokens. Although these methods demonstrated competitive performance on reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmarks, they struggle to address the mismatch between the objectives of retrieval and generation. In this work, we propose SHIFT (**S**elf-reconstruction **H**arnesses **I**mplicit **F**ine-grained **T**hinking for Retrieval), a retrieval training framework based on LLMs. Firstly, we transfer LLMs into reasoning-efficient retrievers with residual projection and task-oriented bidirectional attention aggregation in the latent space. Secondly, we alleviate the mismatch between contrastive learning and implicit reasoning using fine-grained next-token-prediction-based reconstruction. Extensive experiments on reasoning-intensive retrieval benchmarks show that SHIFT consistently outperforms other widely used retrievers. We also carried out a detailed analysis to illustrate how our method works.

Code security and usability are both essential for various coding assistant applications driven by large language models (LLMs). Current code security benchmarks focus solely on single evaluation task and paradigm, such as code completion and generation, lacking comprehensive assessment across dimensions like secure code generation, vulnerability repair and discrimination. In this paper, we first propose CoV-Eval, a multi-task benchmark covering various tasks such as code completion, vulnerability repair, vulnerability detection and classification, for comprehensive evaluation of LLM code security. Besides, we developed VC-Judge, an improved judgment model that aligns closely with human experts and can review LLM-generated programs for vulnerabilities in a more efficient and reliable way. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 20 proprietary and open-source LLMs. Overall, while most LLMs identify vulnerable codes well, they still tend to generate insecure codes and struggle with recognizing specific vulnerability types and performing repairs. Extensive experiments and qualitative analyses reveal key challenges and optimization directions, offering insights for future research in LLM code security.