CausalCoT is an inference framework that enhances causal transparency in chain-of-thought prompting by structuring problems as a directed acyclic graph of atomic sub-questions. Each node is evaluated in an isolated context that includes only its direct causal parents, thereby preventing attention leakage to unrelated content. This approach maintains competitive predictive performance while significantly improving explanation faithfulness, raising causal sensitivity of intermediate reasoning steps by an average of 12 percentage points and up to 21 percentage points over the strongest baseline, and enables predictable test-time interventions through the structured dependency graph.
By Gabriele Dominici, Teague McMillan, Fazl Barez, Marc Langheinrich, Martin Gjoreski
arXiv:2607. 15281v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Causal and intervention-based question answering is fundamental to advancing large language models (LLMs) toward reasoning beyond surface-level correlations and understanding underlying causal mechanisms.
By Su Lan, Xuefei Yin, Yanming Zhu, Alan Wee-Chung Liew
arXiv:2508. 21010v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Existing Causal-Why Video Question Answering (VideoQA) models often struggle with higher-order reasoning, relying on opaque, monolithic pipelines that entangle video understanding, causal inference, and answer generation.
By Paritosh Parmar, Eric Peh, Basura Fernando
The paper investigates whether latent chain-of-thought (latent CoT) models truly perform reasoning by examining twenty-one model-task configurations across different training recipes, tasks, and backbones. Using chain deletion, content replacement, probes, and trajectory analysis, the authors find that on logical tasks the latent chain often contains an answer before the chain starts and can be deleted with little effect, while on arithmetic tasks the chain’s content is essential. The study introduces a taxonomy that distinguishes what a chain represents from how a model uses it, clarifying that readable latent states alone do not prove reasoning.
By Jingjie Qiu, Sheldon Yu, Xunyi Jiang, Jiajin Liu, Zihan Huang, Zhendong Chu, Tong Yu, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu
arXiv:2606. 13603v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is the dominant paradigm for inference-time scaling in language models, yet the causal influence of individual steps on the final answer poorly understood.
By Daniel Scalena, Sara Candussio, Luca Bortolussi, Elisabetta Fersini, Malvina Nissim, Gabriele Sarti
arXiv:2602. 20094v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) witness increasing deployment in complex, high-stakes decision-making scenarios, it becomes imperative to ground their reasoning in causality rather than spurious correlations.
By Yuzhe Wang, Yaochen Zhu, Jundong Li
arXiv:2510. 13554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps.
By Yang Li, Zhichen Dong, Yuhan Sun, Weixun Wang, Shaopan Xiong, Yijia Luo, Jiashun Liu, Han Lu, Jiamang Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng, Junchi Yan
The paper introduces Causal Shortcut Learning (CSL), a framework that identifies token chains—called causal shortcuts—that guide Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) toward correct reasoning paths. By extracting these shortcuts and applying parallel prioritized masking during training, CSL improves both convergence speed and generation accuracy. Experiments on several reasoning benchmarks and two base models show CSL outperforms existing SFT-variant baselines, achieving an average 1.92% improvement over SFT-only models and up to 4.20% on MATH-500.
By Dian Jin, Kairong Han, Baohong Li, Xinpeng Dong, Zijing Hu, Nuanqiao Shan, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang
The paper introduces a sequential activation patching framework to study how Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting influences large language models over multiple generated tokens. By tracking CoT-conditioned attention-head activations across token positions and aggregating them with Part-of-Speech guidance, the authors identify distributed head sets that jointly contribute to answer generation. Targeted zero-ablation experiments confirm that these heads are functionally important, affecting mechanisms such as reasoning-trajectory maintenance, answer anchoring, exemplar-target separation, and numerical generation.
By Murat Dura, Serkan \"Ozt\"urk, Selma Tekir
arXiv:2510. 27544v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Current training paradigms, optimized for long-horizon reasoning trace execution, have made Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at pattern matching and forward simulation of reasoning, but underperform at counterfactual causal understanding and reasoning.
By Nikolaus Holzer, William Fishell, Baishakhi Ray, Mark Santolucito
arXiv:2604. 08571v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high performance on standard mathematical benchmarks, their problem-solving abilities depend on the context and textual formatting.
By Pavel Golikov, Evgenii Opryshko, Gennady Pekhimenko, Mark C. Jeffrey
arXiv:2606. 01243v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Latent reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform multi-step inference within continuous hidden states, offering efficiency gains over explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT).
By Shuochen Chang, Tong Bai, Xiaofeng Zhang, Qianli Ma, Qingyang Liu, Zhaohe Liao, Yibo Miao, Li Niu