arXiv AI

Does Verbose Chain-of-Thought Really Help? In-Distribution Evidence that Content, Not Length, Matters

arXiv:2606. 30128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM reasoning, but the source is contested: do the intermediate steps help because they carry useful semantic content, or because conditioning on more tokens buys extra computation before the model commits to an answer?

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Detecting Hidden Chain-of-Thought in Large Language Models with Linguistic, Behavioral, and Mechanistic Indicators

arXiv:2608.29956v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models often answer complex reasoning questions without revealing intermediate steps, raising whether they reason latently or complete p...

By Armaan Singh, Ryan Trinh Le, Jasmine Kaur, Abdullah Sultan, Edward Lue Chee Lip, Kiran Nijjer, Adnan Ahmed, Vasu Sharma
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Are Stated Reasoning Steps Causally Load-Bearing?

The study investigates whether the reasoning steps a language model writes are causally responsible for its answers. Using a causal intervention method on the activation stream, the authors find that for Qwen3-4B, about 77% of stated steps are causally load‑bearing, while behavioral tests overestimate this by roughly 11 percentage points. The faithfulness of reasoning decreases with model size and depth of reasoning, especially for the smaller Qwen3-1.7B.

By Abhiram Bhupatiraju, Rayan Nyaupane