Related papers: CircuitProbe: Predicting Reasoning Circuits in Tra…
Mathematical reasoning models are widely deployed in education, automated tutoring, and decision support systems despite exhibiting fundamental computational instabilities. We demonstrate that state-of-the-art models (Qwen2.5-Math-7B)…
Many proposed applications of neural networks in machine learning, cognitive/brain science, and society hinge on the feasibility of inner interpretability via circuit discovery. This calls for empirical and theoretical explorations of…
Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, fundamentally limiting their ability to generalize to tasks requiring variable-depth reasoning, such as multi-hop graph traversal or nested logic. We propose a depth-recurrent…
Recent studies show that the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be improved by applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to question-answering (QA) tasks in areas such as math and coding. With a long context length, LLMs…
Understanding how Large Language Models (LLMs) perform logical reasoning internally remains a fundamental challenge. While prior mechanistic studies focus on identifying taskspecific circuits, they leave open the question of what…
Large Language Models often achieve strong performance by generating long intermediate chain-of-thought reasoning. However, it remains unclear when a model's final answer is actually determined during generation. If the answer is already…
In practice, rigorous reasoning is often a key driver of correct code, while Reinforcement Learning (RL) for code generation often neglects optimizing reasoning quality. Bringing process-level supervision into RL is appealing, but it faces…
Explaining why a language model produces a particular output requires local, input-level explanations. Existing methods uncover global capability circuits (e.g., indirect object identification), but not why the model answers a specific…
Due to the size and complexity of modern large language models (LLMs), it has proven challenging to uncover the underlying mechanisms that models use to solve reasoning problems. For instance, is their reasoning for a specific problem…
Circuit discovery aims to identify minimal subnetworks that are responsible for specific behaviors in large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches primarily rely on iterative edge pruning, which is computationally expensive and limited…
Transformers demonstrate impressive performance on a range of reasoning benchmarks. To evaluate the degree to which these abilities are a result of actual reasoning, existing work has focused on developing sophisticated benchmarks for…
Reasoning models (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) generate long chains of thought to solve harder problems, but they often loop, repeating the same text at low temperatures or with greedy decoding. We study why this happens and what role temperature…
This paper concerns the problem of checking if two shallow (i.e., constant-depth) quantum circuits perform equivalent computations. Equivalence checking is a fundamental correctness question -- needed, e.g., for ensuring that…
Reasoning language models improve performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs), but this process can also increase harmful outputs in adversarial settings. In this work, we ask whether the long CoTs can be…
While transformer models exhibit strong capabilities on linguistic tasks, their complex architectures make them difficult to interpret. Recent work has aimed to reverse engineer transformer models into human-readable representations called…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in tasks requiring complex reasoning, such as code generation, mathematical problem solving, and algorithmic synthesis -- especially when aided by reasoning tokens and…
A fundamental question in interpretability research is to what extent neural networks, particularly language models, implement reusable functions through subnetworks that can be composed to perform more complex tasks. Recent advances in…
Code reasoning refers to the task of predicting the output of a program given its source code and specific inputs. It can measure the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) and also benefit downstream tasks such as code…
Transformers have demonstrated remarkable performance in natural language processing and related domains, as they largely focus on sequential, autoregressive next-token prediction tasks. Yet, they struggle in logical reasoning, not…
Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables reasoning in language models but requires explicit verbalization of intermediate steps. Looped transformers offer an alternative by iteratively refining representations within hidden states. This…