[2604.04852] Strengthening Human-Centric Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Integrity in LLMs via a Structured Prompt Framework

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security arXiv:2604.04852 (cs) [Submitted on 6 Apr 2026] Title:Strengthening Human-Centric Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Integrity in LLMs via a Structured Prompt Framework Authors:Jiling Zhou, Aisvarya Adeseye, Seppo Virtanen, Antti Hakkala, Jouni Isoaho View a PDF of the paper titled Strengthening Human-Centric Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Integrity in LLMs via a Structured Prompt Framework, by Jiling Zhou and 4 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been used to enhance the reasoning capability of LLMs. However, its reliability in security-sensitive analytical tasks remains insufficiently examined, particularly under structured human evaluation. Alternative approaches, such as model scaling and fine-tuning can be used to help improve performance. These methods are also often costly, computationally intensive, or difficult to audit. In contrast, prompt engineering provides a lightweight, transparent, and controllable mechanism for guiding LLM reasoning. This study proposes a structured prompt engineering framework designed to strengthen CoT reasoning integrity while improving security threat and attack detection reliability in local LLM deployments. The framework includes 16 factors grouped into four core dimensions: (1) Context and Scope Control, (2) Evidence Grounding and Traceability, (3) Reasoning Structure and Cognitive Control, and (4) Security-Specific Analytical Constraints. Rather t...