Hugging Face Trending Papers

Chain-of-Thought Entropy as a Reliability Signal: A Preregistered Reproduction

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Chain-of-Thought Entropy as a Reliability Signal: A Preregistered Reproduction

This study independently reproduces the dissociation reported by Zhao (2026) regarding chain-of-thought entropy in large language models. It confirms that the shape of the entropy trajectory predicts answer correctness, while the total entropy drop magnitude does not, across four open-weight models and two benchmarks (GSM8K and MATH‑500). The reproduction also maps settings where the magnitude signal holds or fails and documents protocol differences not reported in the original work.

By Theodore O. Cochran
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

Sensitivity, Causality, and Repair Dissociate: A Layer-Wise Analysis of Perturbation Robustness and Its Scaling

arXiv:2608. 03842v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: When a language model fails on surface-perturbed input (typos, OCR noise, homophones), "which layer is responsible" has three natural operationalizations: where representations diverge most (sensitivity), where restoring clean activations recovers the prediction (causality), and where a small adapter can repair the damage (compensatory capacity) - and we show these three layer maps dissociate.

By Nathan Labiosa, David Buff, Ena Nayak, Erica Donno
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

What Does Chain-of-Thought Entropy Measure? A Channel Audit of Scaffolding, Routing, and Content

The paper investigates how entropy over chain‑of‑thought tokens influences policy decisions such as gradient application, pruning, and collapse detection. By separating scaffold tokens from substantive content, the authors analyze entropy, Kullback–Leibler divergence, and entropy velocity for each channel, proving differences between raw and content conventions and bounding answer diversity. Empirical results across 23 configurations show that scaffold tokens can account for up to 41% of high‑entropy positions, with entropy share growing through distillation, while content conventions outperform raw surprisal on compression tasks and reveal significant answer leakage in re‑fed chains.

By Marios Papamichalis, Regina Ruane
arXiv AI
Sep 7

When Do Internal Probes Beat Reading the Answer? Miscalibrated Readouts and Behavior-Concealed Knowledge in Language Models

A 0.6B language model consistently answers YES to 1,200 logical tests, yet its behavior shows no discrimination. Linear probes reveal the correct verdict with high AUC (0.96) and transfer to unseen structures, but a single scalar readout fails due to a saturated decision threshold offset by +4.6 σ. Adjusting this threshold restores behavior accuracy from 50 % to 81 % and improves higher‑scale models, demonstrating that miscalibrated readouts, not hidden knowledge loss, drive performance gaps.

By Gnaneswar Villuri, Hashmath Shaik, Alex Doboli