Chain-of-Defensive-Thought: Structured Reasoning Elicits Robustness in
  Large Language Models against Reference Corruption
Authors: name: Wenxiao Wang; name: Parsa Hosseini; name: Soheil Feizi
Published: 2025-04-29 13:50:05

Abstract: Chain-of-thought prompting has demonstrated great success in facilitating the
reasoning abilities of large language models. In this work, we explore how
these enhanced reasoning abilities can be exploited to improve the robustness
of large language models in tasks that are not necessarily reasoning-focused.
In particular, we show how a wide range of large language models exhibit
significantly improved robustness against reference corruption using a simple
method called chain-of-defensive-thought, where only a few exemplars with
structured and defensive reasoning are provided as demonstrations. Empirically,
the improvements can be astounding, especially given the simplicity and
applicability of the method. For example, in the Natural Questions task, the
accuracy of GPT-4o degrades from 60% to as low as 3% with standard prompting
when 1 out of 10 references provided is corrupted with prompt injection
attacks. In contrast, GPT-4o using chain-of-defensive-thought prompting
maintains an accuracy of 50%.