arXiv AI
When Chain-of-Thought Fails, the Solution Hides in the Hidden States
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arXiv Computation and Language
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Mechanistic Interpretability of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Sequential Activation Patching
The paper introduces a sequential activation patching framework to study how Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting influences large language models over multiple generated tokens. By tracking CoT-conditioned attention-head activations across token positions and aggregating them with Part-of-Speech guidance, the authors identify distributed head sets that jointly contribute to answer generation. Targeted zero-ablation experiments confirm that these heads are functionally important, affecting mechanisms such as reasoning-trajectory maintenance, answer anchoring, exemplar-target separation, and numerical generation.
arXiv AI
Jul 14
Valid $\ne$ Necessary: Diagnosing Latent Inefficiency in Chain-of-Thought
arXiv:2607. 11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it often incurs substantial computational costs due to over-reasoning: the generation of redundant, verbose, or irrelevant steps.
arXiv AI
Jul 24
Post-Hoc Reasoning in Chain of Thought: Decoding and Steering Pre-Committed Answers
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 Computation and Language
3d ago
Every Token Leaves a Ripple in the Stream of Thought: Eliciting Model-Internal Token Saliency for Chain-of-Thought Compression
arXiv:2608.31066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves multi-step problem solving, but long reasoning traces inflate inference cost. Token-level CoT compression red...
arXiv AI
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Does Verbose Chain-of-Thought Really Help? In-Distribution Evidence that Content, Not Length, Matters
arXiv:2606. 30128v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM reasoning, but the source is contested: do the intermediate steps help because they carry useful semantic content, or because conditioning on more tokens buys extra computation before the model commits to an answer?
arXiv Machine Learning
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Rethinking Reasoning with MDLMs: Early Exits, Post-hoc Reasoning, and Beyond
arXiv:2510. 19990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reasoning paradigm, where language models reason before answering, has enabled breakthroughs on tasks such as mathematical problem-solving.