arXiv AI
Oct 1

Making LLMs Say What They Think: Measuring and Improving CoT-Interpretability Alignment

The paper introduces CoT-Interpretability Alignment (CIA), a metric that quantifies how well a large language model’s chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations match its internal reasoning processes. Evaluated on two-hop question answering, hint intervention, and integer multiplication across three LLMs, the study finds limited alignment (44.8–75.9%) and demonstrates that post‑training with a reward combining task accuracy and parametric faithfulness can substantially improve CoT faithfulness without sacrificing accuracy. The authors provide a framework for auditing CoT faithfulness and a pathway to making explicit reasoning more trustworthy, with code and data publicly available.

By Yihuai Hong, Shauli Ravfogel, Chen Zhao, Eunsol Choi