Large reasoning models (LRMs) take longer on harder problems, just as humans do. This surface similarity hides an opposite pattern within items.
The paper investigates whether the reasoning process in large language models mitigates or exacerbates bias. Using a within-model ablation on three high-stakes datasets (Adult, COMPAS, Credit) across three 32‑B models, the authors find that reasoning resolves some counterfactual fairness flips but creates roughly five times as many new flips at high confidence. They introduce two dynamic tools—Counterfactual Depth Probability Gap and Bias Transition Matrix—to trace how bias propagates and amplifies during reasoning depth and to explain the asymmetric dual effect.
By Deng Pan, Joe Germino, Yihong Ma, Elizabeth Daly, Nuno Moniz, Ting Hua, Nitesh Chawla
arXiv:2506. 21571v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which autonomously produce a reasoning Chain of Thought (CoT) before producing final responses, offer a promising approach to interpreting and monitoring model behaviors.
By Jianshuo Dong, Yujia Fu, Chuanrui Hu, Chao Zhang, Han Qiu
arXiv:2607. 16451v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chat models sometimes commit to an answer and then produce reasoning that justifies it rather than deriving it -- even when the answer contradicts a task premise.
By Heejin Jo
arXiv:2608.28623v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Large multimodal reasoning models (LMRMs) are increasingly capable, largely through generating explicit chain-of-thought reasoning before ans...
By Mahir Numayeer Islam, Gakuto Okuyama, Nikolaus Siauw, Shivank Garg, Madhur Panwar, Vasu Sharma
arXiv:2607. 18114v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern LLMs are alarmingly susceptible to surprisingly simple immaterial changes of input prompts: a casual hint, an incorrectly labeled few-shot example, or a fake prior assistant turn often flips an originally correct answer.
By Prakhar Gupta, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Florent Draye, Bernhard Sch\"olkopf, Zhijing Jin
The paper compares human group discussions with large language model (LLM) deliberation traces on various reasoning tasks, finding that both humans and LLMs exhibit an assembly bonus asymmetry where discussion benefits the average member more than the best initial member. While LLM groups mirror some outcome-level patterns of human deliberation, they differ in process-level behaviors: they tend to follow majorities, surface less unique information, and converge earlier. Interventions inspired by human group‑decision research yield modest outcome improvements but do not eliminate coordination bottlenecks.
By Ala N. Tak, Teruhisa Misu, Kumar Akash, Zhaobo K. Zheng, Kevin H. Joo, Jonathan Gratch
arXiv:2609.22090v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: An LLM producing the response pattern associated with a human psychological effect is not the same claim as the LLM possessing that bias. We present Ps...
By Joy Bose
arXiv:2608. 11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging by task arithmetic works until it doesn't, and the field diagnoses why with magnitudes: layerwise representation bias, deviations from cross-task linearity, parameter overlap.
By Chencheng Zhu
The study investigates how limited reading capacity and claim wording influence consensus outcomes in language‑model networks. By modeling message capacity as the number of messages an agent reads, the authors show that when agents read fewer than about 6.4 messages on average, a wrong consensus becomes unreachable. However, the wording of a claim—its inherent threshold—can override this effect, leading to incorrect consensus even when most agents start correct.
By Makoto Fukushima
The paper demonstrates that a prompt’s influence is not inherent to the prompt itself but depends on the model, as prompts optimized for one model degrade on another and rankings shift under neutral reformatting. By examining a task‑free structural readout—specifically the fixed‑point behavior of a short‑window argmax map—the authors show that nine tokens of conditioning can move the fixed‑point fraction across most of its range, altering structural classes and model rankings, while instruction tuning has no effect. Attempts to explain this phenomenon through prefix length, content type, bidirectionality, or attention‑sink dominance all fail, indicating that the prompt‑model pair is the fundamental unit of explanation.
whyItMatters":"The study reveals that prompt effectiveness is model‑specific and that simple structural readouts can capture this interaction, challenging assumptions about prompt generality and guiding future prompt‑engineering efforts."
By Nicol\'as Vera Z\'u\~niga
The study investigates how demographic identity is represented in a language model, using representational similarity analysis against Pew survey data across 169 demographic cells. It finds that standard last‑token read‑outs underestimate the model’s fidelity, while specific attention heads (notably L11 H16) capture demographic structure more accurately, though race‑based types remain weak. Causal interventions reveal that high fidelity does not guarantee causal use, and a 128‑dimensional probe of a single head improves alignment with survey truth but fails to recover per‑question group ordering.