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: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:2608. 02820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is an increasingly important component of AI safety stacks but relies on the assumption that a model's reasoning trace is informative about its actions.
By Giorgio Severi, Shujaat Mirza, Blake Bullwinkel, Amanda Minnich
arXiv:2607. 26102v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Mathematical chain of thought (CoT) evaluation is commonly reduced to whether the final answer matches a reference.
By Vivek Shukla, Varun Shukla, Atul, Divya Mishra, Mehul Kumar Das
arXiv:2607. 04572v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM) tutors often produce fluent step-by-step explanations, but a correct and pedagogically formatted response does not guarantee that the answer was derived from the student-facing problem.
By Bonan Shen, Dingyan Shang, Youting Wang, Tao Ning
arXiv:2607. 07229v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prior work has shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is often unfaithful: a model's stated reasoning does not reliably reflect the process that produced its output.
By Silvia Santano
arXiv:2606. 11211v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ability of large language models (LLMs) to express calibrated uncertainty is important for safe deployment.
By Prakul Sunil Hiremath, Harshit R. Hiremath
arXiv:2606. 05402v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce reasoning traces with non-linear structures, such as backtracking and self-correction, that complicate the evaluation and monitoring of the reasoning process.
By Jinu Lee, Shivam Agarwal, Amruta Parulekar, Siddarth Madala, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Julia Hockenmaier
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
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
arXiv:2602. 13904v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety.
By Manqing Liu, David Williams-King, Ida Caspary, Linh Le, Hannes Whittingham, Puria Radmard, Cameron Tice, Edward James Young
arXiv:2603. 01437v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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 verbalized reasoning.
By Kyle Cox, Darius Kianersi, Adri\`a Garriga-Alonso