The paper investigates in-context binding errors in language models, showing that a linear probe can recover correct entity bindings from frozen hidden states even when the model outputs incorrect bindings. Across 16 checkpoints, the probe’s accuracy on failure cases surpasses a baseline by about 0.196, and a probe‑based score improves failure detection over the model’s confidence by 0.079 AUROC. Steering the residual stream toward the probe‑decoded binding further boosts accuracy by an average of 0.168 across eight models.
By Manas Venkata Sai Ravulapalli, Samrath Singh Chadha, Abhinav M. Hari
arXiv:2606. 06635v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Failures in language model reasoning emerge through distinct processes that leave identifiable signatures in the reasoning trace.
By Tanvi Thoria, Kiana Jafari, Marc R. Schlichting, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
arXiv:2606. 05145v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When post-trained language models fail on reasoning problems, the common test-time-scaling response is to spend more compute on additional attempts, and the failed traces play no further role.
By Nizar Islah, Istabrak Abbes, Irina Rish, Sarath Chandar, Eilif B. Muller
arXiv:2608. 11415v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models are being proposed as agents in scientific workflows, in domains where no downstream verifier exists.
By Valentin Rodionov, Shamil Assylbekov
The paper investigates the reliability of tool‑using agents, focusing on two failure modes: selecting the wrong tool and constructing incorrect arguments. It introduces a correct‑invocation rate metric to distinguish these errors and evaluates five open‑weight models on multi‑step tasks up to depth 8, finding that by depth 6 about 70% of a model’s clean‑context capability is lost due to earlier mistakes. The study reveals that exact‑match scoring against a fixed gold trajectory forces severity and recovery parameters to extreme values, and proposes a conditional‑on‑state scoring remedy that yields more realistic severity estimates.
By Afiya Noorain, Subhranshu Mohanty, Amritesh Banerjee, Abhijit Dasgupta
arXiv:2608. 03291v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language model (LLM) performance while also providing an observable interface to the model's reasoning process.
By Shashwat Sourav, Aishwarya Balwani
arXiv:2607. 17188v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: While test-time scaling improves the problem-solving ability of large reasoning models (LRMs) through additional inference-time computation, it can also exacerbate overthinking and underthinking, which we formulate as reasoning state--action mismatch.
By Cheng Yan, Zhijun Fan, Guangyang Ye, Fan Xu, Xiang Xia, Yawei Wang, Wuyang Zhang
arXiv:2608.25920v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As large language model (LLM)-based multi-agent systems (MASs) are increasingly applied to long-horizon complex tasks, their reliability has emerge...
By Zhongwen Luan, Xiaoyu Zhang, Ming Hu, Yue Yang, Jiongchi Yu, Xiaohong Chen
The study investigates whether hints that convert failing code generation attempts into passing ones provide new information or simply guide models toward solutions they could already generate. Using Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct and Phi-3.5-mini on HumanEval+ and MBPP+, the authors find that relevant hints rescue a significant portion of failures, yet many of those solutions are also recoverable through ordinary sampling. Mechanistic tests reveal a shared activation direction between relevant and unrelated hints, but adding this direction does not improve overall accuracy, indicating limited task-general transfer.
By Will Badr
arXiv:2609.20973v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Complex problem solving (CPS) with large language models (LLMs) is often framed as a matter of stronger reasoning or longer generation. Yet early-ste...
By Jiazhang Cai, Tao Wang, Ruidong Zhang, Siyuan Li, Terry Ma, Luyang Fang, Haoran Lu, Huimin Cheng, Yingchuan Zhang, Shushan Wu, Rui Xie, Lin Tang, Chao Huang, Rongjie Liu, Ziyu Liu, Meizhi Yu, Yongkai Chen, Yifan Zhou, Zeliang Sun, Chang Liu, Zhen Xiang, Wei Xiao, Zixin Rao, Xinyi Liu, Yutong Hu, Mengrui Zhang, Jing Zhang, Weidi Luo, Jincheng Yu, Zhengliang Liu, Weihang You, Hanqi Jiang, Yi Pan, Junhao Chen, Xinliang Li, Tianming Liu, Wenxuan Zhong, Ping Ma
arXiv:2607. 09999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that post-training quantization can silently alter how large language models reason even when task accuracy is preserved.
By Renuka Oladri, Mohan Vamsi Varadaraju Priya, Jerry Wu
arXiv:2608. 07899v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent systems increasingly expose execution traces, yet telemetry that reveals a failure may still be inadequate for identifying where that failure originated.
By Yuxuan Zhu, Peng Pu