Compliance vs. Sensibility: On the Reasoning Controllability in Large Language Models
Read the original on arXiv AI →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv AI.
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arXiv:2511. 04694v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As large language model (LLM) based systems take on high-stakes roles in real-world decision-making, they must reconcile competing instructions from multiple sources within a single prompt context.
The paper investigates chain-of-thought (CoT) controllability in reasoning models, noting that traditional evaluations show low controllability when constraints are given in user prompts. It introduces Self‑Instructed CoT Controllability, where constraints are embedded as self‑instructions within the model’s CoT, leading to markedly higher controllability. The study also shows that simple self‑instruction prompts can bootstrap effective control and that this capability can be exploited for monitor evasion, raising concerns about CoT monitorability.
arXiv:2606. 07808v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning language models deployed in agentic workflows must follow an instruction hierarchy: when instructions from different sources conflict, the model should obey the highest-privilege applicable instruction.
arXiv:2605. 15454v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reasoning-trained language models often spend more tokens on harder problems, but longer chains of thought do not show whether a model is merely computing for more steps or following a different internal trajectory.
arXiv:2603. 01437v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As chain of thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through verbalized reasoning.
arXiv:2604. 06628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes.