arXiv AI

An Enigma of Artificial Reason: Investigating the Production-Evaluation Gap in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606. 01462v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies of human reasoning have shown that people are typically stronger at evaluating reasoning than producing it from scratch.

arXiv AI
Jun 3

Thinking Past the Answer: Evaluating Harmful Overthinking in Large Reasoning Models

arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.

By Simone Caldarella, Davide Talon, Rahaf Aljundi, Elisa Ricci, Massimiliano Mancini
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
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
Aug 11

Reason Wide, Not Deep: Amortizing the Reasoning Premium into Distilled Skills

arXiv:2608. 07885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning modes of language models outperform their non-reasoning counterparts on multi-step agentic tasks, but pay a 3-6x premium in output tokens on every episode -- much of it spent re-deriving procedures that are shared across episodes of the same domain.

By Agamdeep Singh, Srishti Gautam, Priyanshu Gupta, Nikita Mehrotra, Tanmay Bakshi, Sumit Gulwani
arXiv AI
Sep 3

When Can Large Reasoning Models Save Thinking? Mechanistic Analysis of Behavioral Divergence in Reasoning

The paper investigates why large reasoning models (LRMs) often continue to think even when prompted to stop, a phenomenon called "Still-thinking". By examining confidence at the thinking-termination boundary, internal attention divergences, and attention allocation across prompt segments, the authors find that high perplexity and greater attention to the original question correlate with continued thinking. They propose an attention‑intervention method that suppresses explicit reasoning, which reduces inefficiency but also lowers accuracy, underscoring a trade‑off between instruction compliance, inference speed, and correctness.

By Rongzhi Zhu, Yi Liu, Jiancheng Wang, Xiangyu Liu, Zequn Sun, Yiwei Wang, Yu Deng, Zijian Zhou, Wei Hu
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Do Reasoning Representations Help Humans Evaluate LLM Outputs?

The paper investigates whether reasoning representations—explanations for large language model outputs—aid humans in evaluating those outputs. A controlled human study tested six reasoning formats across tasks of varying complexity, measuring structural understanding, error detection, and trust calibration. Results revealed a mismatch: participants favored planning- and decomposition-based representations, yet simpler chain-of-thought traces better supported verification, trust, and interpretability, while preferred formats increased calibration risks.

By Jaewoo Lim, Sungbok Shin, Sanghyun Hong