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Related papers: Mapping Faithful Reasoning in Language Models

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While chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is an appealing AI safety defense, recent work on "unfaithfulness" has cast doubt on its reliability. These findings highlight an important failure mode, particularly when CoT acts as a post-hoc…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Scott Emmons , Erik Jenner , David K. Elson , Rif A. Saurous , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Heng Chen , Irhum Shafkat , Rohin Shah

Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting have enabled large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning. However, the explainability of such reasoning remains limited, with prior work primarily focusing on local…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Sheldon Yu , Yuxin Xiong , Junda Wu , Xintong Li , Tong Yu , Xiang Chen , Ritwik Sinha , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley

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…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting assumes that generated reasoning reflects a model's internal computation. We show this assumption is wrong in a specific, measurable way: models internally detect their own reasoning errors but outwardly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Aojie Yuan , Zhiyuan Julian Su , Haiyue Zhang , Yi Nian , Yue Zhao

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yufeng Zhang , Xuepeng Wang , Lingxiang Wu , Jinqiao Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs), but generated reasoning traces may not faithfully reflect the model's actual decision process. Existing CoT unfaithfulness detectors…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Xu Shen , Zhen Tan , Song Wang , Pingjun Hong , Rui Miao , Xin Wang , Tianlong Chen

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a key technique for eliciting complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Although interpretable, its dependence on natural language limits the model's expressive bandwidth. Continuous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Sharan Ramjee

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being employed in real-world applications in critical domains such as healthcare, it is important to ensure that the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning generated by these models faithfully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Sree Harsha Tanneru , Dan Ley , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Recent progress in reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) has been driven by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces, where models generate intermediate reasoning traces before producing an answer. These traces, as in DeepSeek…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Siddhant Bhambri , Upasana Biswas , Subbarao Kambhampati

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used inference-time technique for improving reasoning, yet its gains are uneven across tasks. We analyze when and why CoT helps by modeling the step-wise reasoning trajectory as a Markov chain.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zihan Wang , Yijun Dong , Qi Lei

Recent findings suggest that misaligned models may exhibit deceptive behavior, raising concerns about output trustworthiness. Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a promising tool for alignment monitoring: when models articulate their reasoning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Artur Zolkowski , Wen Xing , David Lindner , Florian Tramèr , Erik Jenner

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Pengcheng Wen , Yanxu Zhu , Jiapeng Sun , Han Zhu , Yujin Zhou , Chi-Min Chan , Sirui Han , Yike Guo

Reasoning-capable language models achieve state-of-the-art performance in diverse complex tasks by generating long, explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces. While recent works show that base models can acquire such reasoning traces via…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one of the most promising tools we have for detecting model misbehavior, but its effectiveness depends on models faithfully externalizing their reasoning. Motivated by this vulnerability, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Reilly Haskins , Bilal Chughtai , Joshua Engels

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. Previous work attempts to evaluate it but falls short in providing an in-depth analysis of patterns that influence the CoT. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Yubo Chen , Jiexin Xu , Huaijun Li , Xiaojian Jiang , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Large language models can generate long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet prior work suggests that CoT can be post-hoc rationalization rather than a faithful reflection of the computation through explicitly designed settings. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiachen Zhao , Yiyou Sun , Weiyan Shi , Dawn Song

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kyle Cox , Darius Kianersi , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Equipped with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning ability in various downstream tasks. Even so, suffering from hallucinations and the inability to access external knowledge, LLMs often come…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Keheng Wang , Feiyu Duan , Sirui Wang , Peiguang Li , Yunsen Xian , Chuantao Yin , Wenge Rong , Zhang Xiong

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a method that enables language models to handle complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler steps. Despite its success, the underlying mechanics of CoT are not yet fully understood. In an attempt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Yingcong Li , Kartik Sreenivasan , Angeliki Giannou , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

Due to the proliferation of short-form content and the rapid adoption of AI, opportunities for deep, reflective thinking have significantly diminished, undermining users' critical thinking and reducing engagement with the reasoning behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Seunghyun Yoo