arXiv Machine Learning

Thinking Leakage: A Causal Audit of NoThink Post-Training in Hybrid Reasoning Models

The paper investigates ‘thinking leakage’ in post‑training hybrid reasoning models that operate in NoThink mode. Using a causal mediation framework and bidirectional interventions, the authors show that the performance gains attributed to NoThink training largely stem from the model drifting toward its Think mode. Across three models and three training methods on competition math benchmarks, leakage ratios between 42% and 79% were observed, indicating that much of the accuracy improvement is due to re‑invoking existing Think behavior rather than genuine NoThink capability.

arXiv AI
Sep 17

Bypassing the Rationale: Causal Auditing of Implicit Reasoning in Language Models

The paper introduces a causal, layerwise audit method called the CoT Mediation Index (CMI) to evaluate whether chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting truly influences a language model’s internal computation. By comparing performance degradation from patching CoT-token hidden states against matched control patches, the authors find that CoT influence is often confined to narrow reasoning windows and can be nearly absent even when the model produces fluent rationales. The study shows that models explicitly tuned for reasoning exhibit stronger mediation, while Mixture-of-Experts models display more distributed mediation, indicating that CoT faithfulness varies across models and tasks.

By Anish Sathyanarayanan, Aditya Nagarsekar, Aarush Rathore
arXiv AI
Sep 3

When Can Large Reasoning Models Save Thinking? Mechanistic Analysis of Behavioral Divergence in Reasoning

The paper investigates why large reasoning models (LRMs) often continue to think even when prompted to stop, a phenomenon called "Still-thinking". By examining confidence at the thinking-termination boundary, internal attention divergences, and attention allocation across prompt segments, the authors find that high perplexity and greater attention to the original question correlate with continued thinking. They propose an attention‑intervention method that suppresses explicit reasoning, which reduces inefficiency but also lowers accuracy, underscoring a trade‑off between instruction compliance, inference speed, and correctness.

By Rongzhi Zhu, Yi Liu, Jiancheng Wang, Xiangyu Liu, Zequn Sun, Yiwei Wang, Yu Deng, Zijian Zhou, Wei Hu
arXiv AI
Sep 4

</think> Doesn't Stop Reasoning: Analysis of Spurious CoT Termination

The paper investigates a training‑free early‑exit technique that inserts an end‑of‑think (EoT) token to terminate chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning in large reasoning models. It finds that the injected EoT often fails to cleanly switch the model from reasoning to answering, leading to continued reasoning‑like generation—termed spurious CoT termination—whose length scales with the amount of reasoning saved. By increasing attention to the EoT token through Exit‑token Attention Biasing (EAB), the authors reduce spurious termination and shorten the answering phase across multiple models and benchmarks.

By Seunghee Koh, Sungjae Choi, Minchan Kwon, Sunghyun Baek, Junmo Kim