Detecting Chain-of-Thought Hijacking in Backdoored Multimodal Large Reasoning Models

Abstract

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables multimodal large reasoning models (MLRMs) to solve complex visual problems, but also exposes them to CoT hijacking: an adversary implants a backdoor through poisoned fine-tuning so that a visual trigger induces a hijacking turn, redirecting an otherwise faithful reasoning chain to an attacker-chosen answer. However, since the hijack acts within the reasoning chain, existing multimodal backdoor defenses designed for MLLMs that answer directly struggle to detect it. Moreover, inspecting the chain itself does not reliably expose the hijack, since the hijacking turn can resemble honest self-correction in form. In this paper, we find that honest reasoning tends to revise its answer at high-entropy "aha moments", whereas a hijack can overturn a confident answer through a near-deterministic turn. To quantify this contrast, we formalize this phenomenon as belief inertia, the cumulative next-token entropy of a reasoning span minus the answer-belief revision it induces, with markedly lower values for hijacked spans than for honest reasoning spans. Since hijacking tokens are also image-dependent, we further improve detection by restricting the measure to image-dependent spans, yielding visual belief inertia (VBI). Building on this, we propose InertiaGuard, a training-free, test-time detector that flags a trace when its VBI falls below a threshold calibrated on a small set of clean traces. Across various attacks and benchmarks, InertiaGuard achieves higher detection performance than existing baselines, while generalizing to different model architectures and trigger types.