arXiv AI

The Reliance Hypothesis: Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness Rises as Language Resource Level Falls

The paper investigates how Chain-of-Thought (CoT) faithfulness varies with language resource level and task type. Using MMMLU multiple-choice questions in eight languages, it finds that CoT faithfulness increases as resource level decreases for knowledge-intensive tasks but not for reasoning-intensive ones. The authors propose the Reliance Hypothesis, suggesting that models rely more on reasoning when they lack recall, especially in lower-resource languages, and note that model confidence partly explains this effect.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

Efficient Reasoning Training Does Not Always Harm CoT Faithfulness and Monitorability

The paper investigates how training large language models to use fewer tokens in chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning impacts the faithfulness and monitorability of the generated explanations. Three efficiency methods—fixed generation budget, per-example length target, and group-relative length reward—were applied during fine‑tuning, and the resulting models were evaluated on how well their CoT reflects decision processes and whether it signals changes due to input interventions. Results show that while faithfulness generally decreases because models become less consistent, monitorability remains relatively robust, with models still indicating the influence of input changes even when CoT is shortened.

By Samuel Lewis-Lim, Xingwei Tan, Mario Sanger, Zhixue Zhao, Nikolaos Aletras
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Choosing the Right Language Mode at Inference Time for Multilingual Reliability

The paper investigates how multilingual large language models can be guided to reason more reliably in low- to mid-resource languages by selecting appropriate language modes during inference. Experiments with LLaMA and Qwen models show that using English context can correct errors from non‑English comprehension, but adding redundant bilingual context can cause interference. To balance this trade‑off, the authors propose Reliability‑Aware Adaptive Inference (RAAI), a training‑free test‑time framework that routes prompts based on Expected Calibration Error and gates reasoning with a mid‑layer Risk Index, achieving up to 37.7% accuracy gains and reduced calibration error on low‑resource languages.

By Ekata Mitra, Ameeta Agrawal
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Rethinking the Multilingual Reasoning Gap with Layer Swap

The study investigates the performance gap between native-language reasoning and English-pivoted reasoning in large language models. By creating extensive multilingual reasoning datasets and fine‑tuning specialists on Qwen/Qwen3-8B-Base, the authors find that the native reasoning gap is much smaller (1.9–3.5%) than previously reported. They analyze weight‑space changes, discover a language‑agnostic reasoning core in the middle layers, and propose a Layer Swap technique that transfers these mid‑layer updates from an English specialist to native specialists, effectively closing most of the gap while maintaining native chain‑of‑thought output.

By Maxence Lasbordes, Am\'elie Chatelain, Djam\'e Seddah
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 8

The Long Road to the Same Answer: Cognitive Bias Under Escalating Reasoning Budgets in Large Language Models

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) that allocate extra computation during inference—termed reasoning models—reduce classic decision biases compared to their non‑reasoning counterparts. Using 30 vignettes covering six cognitive biases and varying token budgets up to 8,192 tokens, the authors find that reasoning models are not less biased, and increased deliberation does not reliably diminish bias magnitude. Only anchoring showed a bias in the human direction, while other biases either remained unchanged or moved further from human patterns, suggesting that test‑time reasoning does not guarantee rationality.

By Obada Kraishan