arXiv AI

Making LLMs Say What They Think: Measuring and Improving CoT-Interpretability Alignment

The paper introduces CoT-Interpretability Alignment (CIA), a metric that quantifies how well a large language model’s chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations match its internal reasoning processes. Evaluated on two-hop question answering, hint intervention, and integer multiplication across three LLMs, the study finds limited alignment (44.8–75.9%) and demonstrates that post‑training with a reward combining task accuracy and parametric faithfulness can substantially improve CoT faithfulness without sacrificing accuracy. The authors provide a framework for auditing CoT faithfulness and a pathway to making explicit reasoning more trustworthy, with code and data publicly available.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

ReFIne: A Framework for Trustworthy Large Reasoning Models with Reliability, Faithfulness, and Interpretability

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 Machine Learning
Jul 28

Does Faithfulness-Guided Alignment Hurt Accuracy? Unlocking Accurate and Faithful Post-Retrieval Reasoning

arXiv:2602. 01348v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions, but outcome-level rewards often leave reasoning traces weakly grounded and difficult to audit.

By Yu Liu, Wenxiao Zhang, Diandian Guo, Cong Cao, Fangfang Yuan, Qiang Sun, Yanbing Liu, Jin B. Hong, Zhiyuan Ma
arXiv AI
Aug 17

The Metacognitive Bottleneck: Japanese Riddles Reveal Fundamental Limits of Machine Insight and Self-Evaluation in Reasoning AI

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 Computation and Language
Aug 25

GRACE: Step-Level Benchmark for Faithful Reasoning over Context

GRACE is a step‑level benchmark for evaluating the faithfulness of chain‑of‑thought reasoning over context. It provides human annotations for each step in CoT traces from 10 models across 4 datasets, labeling faithfulness, error category, and natural‑language explanations. The benchmark introduces a data‑driven taxonomy that splits errors into GRACE‑Inference (deductive) and GRACE‑Grounding (factual) tracks, each with four categories, and demonstrates that incorporating step‑level faithfulness signals can improve downstream accuracy and reasoning reliability.

By Hoang Pham, Dong Le, Anh Tuan Luu
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Zipping the Thought: When and How Compressed Reasoning Data Works in LLM Post-Training

The paper investigates how different forms of compressed chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning—Explicit, Composed, and Implicit—affect large language model (LLM) performance after supervised fine‑tuning (SFT). Using a synthetic compositional reasoning task, the authors show that coarser CoT requires more SFT data, that Composed and Implicit CoT benefit more from data scaling (with Composed also benefiting from repetition), and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can decompose compressed steps learned during SFT. Additionally, unidirectional CoT ordering improves generalization on longer sequential tasks.

By Kohsei Matsutani, Gouki Minegishi, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo