The paper "Strategic Self-Consistency" investigates how large language model providers might exploit the self‑consistency technique—generating multiple reasoning paths and selecting the majority answer—to overcharge users. The authors present a simple, efficient algorithm that strategically generates and reorders extra reasoning paths so that each appears necessary for the majority vote, thereby evading detection by auditors. Experiments on Llama, Qwen, and DeepSeek-R1 models across math, science, and QA benchmarks show that the added paths follow a heavy‑tailed distribution and that significant overcharging can persist even under stringent audits with a false‑positive rate below 0.1.
arXiv:2607. 08017v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large-Language Models (LLMs) can be prone to flawed and unfaithful reasoning that decoding strategies like Self-Consistency (SC) fail to detect as they evaluate only final-answer agreement while ignoring the logical validity of intermediate steps.
arXiv:2606. 18327v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Language models (LMs) that faithfully describe their own behavior can more easily be audited, understood, and trusted by users.
arXiv:2609.21492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has been shown to improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), yet existing optimization methods largely r...
Self-consistency assumes the most frequent answer among sampled reasoning traces is the most reliable, but this can fail in causal reasoning: samples often repeat the same confounding error, and votes fragment across multiple valid answers, letting an invalid answer win despite a valid minority trace. We introduce CALVER (Causal Axiom-Level VERification), a training-free symbolic verifier that scores structured traces against Pearl's causal criteria, including -separation, backdoor adjustment, and intervention, and selects the highest-scoring candidate without consulting a reference answer.
arXiv:2608. 03506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-consistency assumes the most frequent answer among sampled reasoning traces is the most reliable, but this can fail in causal reasoning: samples often repeat the same confounding error, and votes fragment across multiple valid answers, letting an invalid answer win despite a valid minority trace.
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.
arXiv:2607.14109v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Probing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and building robust solutions for Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remain central...
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a small, high-quality set of long reasoning traces is an effective approach for eliciting strong reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods for curating high-quality SFT data rely heavily on strong reasoning models to filter examples based on diversity and difficulty, making the curation process costly while often yielding suboptimal data quality.
arXiv:2607. 18100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extended reasoning has become standard for frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the trajectories these models produce remain largely uncontrollable.
arXiv:2606. 26797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a small, high-quality set of long reasoning traces is an effective approach for eliciting strong reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs).
arXiv:2607. 10139v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the correct answer from a pool of candidate reasoning chains is the engine of test-time scaling, yet the standard selectors each carry a cost: self-consistency inherits the errors of the single model it resamples, and trained reward models need labeled data and transfer poorly off-distribution.
arXiv:2607. 14109v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Probing the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and building robust solutions for Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) remain central challenges in natural language understanding.