arXiv AI

Correct Answers, Invalid Traces: What Verifiable Grade-School Math Reveals About Chain-of-Thought Traces

arXiv AI
Aug 17

The Metacognitive Bottleneck: Japanese Riddles Reveal Fundamental Limits of Machine Insight and Self-Evaluation in Reasoning AI

arXiv:2509. 14704v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark saturation and training-data contamination increasingly obscure whether reported gains in large language models (LLMs) reflect genuine advances in reasoning or familiarity with recurring patterns in benchmark problems.

By Masaharu Mizumoto, Dat Nguyen, Zhiheng Han, Xingfu Li, Yo Nakawake, Le Minh Nguyen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Beyond Accuracy: Measuring Bias Acknowledgment in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Responsible AI Evaluation

arXiv:2606. 15127v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models are increasingly used in settings where the final answer is not the only object of review: educational tools may show students intermediate steps, decision-support systems may require human oversight, and audit workflows may inspect traces for misleading or biased input.

By Xian Sun, Wei Gao, Yingshuo Wang, Lingdong Kong, Yanhang Li, Zhichao Fan, Zexin Zhuang, Wenlong Dong, Zhiyuan Zheng, Hrishikesh Paranjape, Abhishek Mandal, Johnny R. Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 2

The Answer Is Not the Argument

The paper investigates whether giving AI monitors access to the final answer improves their ability to verify reasoning. Using 237 step‑by‑step solutions to physics exam questions, the authors found that answer access mainly helps monitors detect inconsistencies with the final answer rather than independently checking the reasoning. Certification of the answer increased overall accuracy and error localization but reduced the ability to flag critical traces where the answer was correct but the reasoning was flawed.

By Will Yeadon, Sergio Ju\'arez, Paul Mackay, T. J. Dowling, Elise Agra, Oto-obong Inyang, Arin Mizouri, Craig P. Testrow
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

ReFIne: A Framework for Trustworthy Large Reasoning Models with Reliability, Faithfulness, and Interpretability

ReFIne is a training framework that augments large reasoning models with three trustworthiness properties: interpretability, faithfulness, and reliability. It combines supervised fine‑tuning with GRPO to produce structured, tag‑based reasoning traces, explicitly disclose decisive information, and provide self‑assessments of soundness and confidence. Applied to Qwen3 models, ReFIne improves interpretability by 44.0 %, faithfulness by 18.8 %, and reliability by 42.4 % on mathematical benchmarks.

By Chung-En Sun, Ge Yan, Akshay Kulkarni, Tsui-Wei Weng