Related papers: Where Do Reasoning Models Refuse?

As chain-of-thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate chain-of-thought (CoT) traces before producing final outputs, introducing a dynamic internal state that may complicate control mechanisms such as refusal. Unlike instruction-tuned LLMs, where refusal…

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT…

When a language model sees a document contradicting its training knowledge, it must choose: follow the document or trust itself. Prior work proved this choice depends on how well-known the fact is. We ask: does the model's chain-of-thought…

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised…

Language models trained via outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to reason using chain-of-thought (CoT) have shown remarkable performance. Monitoring such a model's CoT may allow us to understand its intentions and detect potential…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is often viewed as a window into LLM decision-making, yet recent work suggests it may function merely as post-hoc rationalization. This raises a critical alignment question: Does the reasoning trace causally shape…

Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) often generate extensive chain-of-thought (CoT) traces before producing a final answer. As explicit textual artifacts, these traces can be passed to other models to solve the same task, enabling cross-model…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been widely adopted to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of CoT reasoning is inconsistent across tasks with different reasoning types. This…

Recent work has demonstrated that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) often yields limited gains for soft-reasoning problems such as analytical and commonsense reasoning. CoT can also be unfaithful to a model's actual reasoning. We investigate the…

Do language models make decisions under uncertainty like humans do, and what role does chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning play in the underlying decision process? We introduce an active probabilistic reasoning task that cleanly separates…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced state-of-the-art AI capabilities. However, recent studies have shown that CoT reasoning is not always faithful when models face an explicit bias in their prompts, i.e., the CoT can…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces are increasingly used both to improve language model capability and to audit model behavior, implicitly assuming that the visible trace remains synchronized with the computation that determines the answer. We…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proposed as a transparency mechanism for large language models in safety-critical deployments, yet its effectiveness depends on faithfulness (whether models accurately verbalize the factors that…

The chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm uses the elicitation of step-by-step rationales as a proxy for reasoning, gradually refining the model's latent representation of a solution. However, it remains unclear just how early a Large Language…

Most work interpreting reasoning models studies only a single chain-of-thought (CoT), yet these models define distributions over many possible CoTs. We argue that studying a single sample is inadequate for understanding causal influence and…

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

From generating headlines to fabricating news, the Large Language Models (LLMs) are typically assessed by their final outputs, under the safety assumption that a refusal response signifies safe reasoning throughout the entire process.…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a promising tool for detecting misbehaviors and understanding the motivations of modern reasoning models. However, if models can control what they verbalize in their CoT, it could undermine CoT…