DOLORES, an agent using a formal language for meta-reasoning to construct adaptive scaffolds on the fly, outperforms prior scaffolding methods by 24.8% on average across four hard benchmarks and multiple model sizes.
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Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
44 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning (i.e., its process for answering the question). We investigate hypotheses for how CoT reasoning may be unfaithful, by examining how the model predictions change when we intervene on the CoT (e.g., by adding mistakes or paraphrasing it). Models show large variation across tasks in how strongly they condition on the CoT when predicting their answer, sometimes relying heavily on the CoT and other times primarily ignoring it. CoT's performance boost does not seem to come from CoT's added test-time compute alone or from information encoded via the particular phrasing of the CoT. As models become larger and more capable, they produce less faithful reasoning on most tasks we study. Overall, our results suggest that CoT can be faithful if the circumstances such as the model size and task are carefully chosen.
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- abstract Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning (i.e., its process for answering the question). We investigate hypotheses for how CoT reasoning may be unfaithful, by examining how the model predictions change when we intervene on the CoT (e.g., by adding mistakes or paraphrasing it). Models show large variation across tasks in how strongly they condition on the CoT when predicting their answer, sometimes
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Corruption studies on CoT chains detect the position of explicit answer statements rather than computational steps, as evidenced by format ablations collapsing suffix sensitivity 19x and models following conflicting answers at high rates.
BiAxisAudit measures LLM bias on two axes—across-prompt sensitivity via factorial grids and within-response divergence via split coding—revealing that task format explains as much variance as model choice and that 63.6% of bias signals appear in only one layer.
LLMs exhibit myopic planning in games, with move choices driven by shallow nodes despite deep reasoning traces, in contrast to human deep-search reliance.
Green Shielding introduces CUE criteria and the HCM-Dx benchmark to demonstrate that routine prompt variations systematically alter LLM diagnostic behavior along clinically relevant dimensions, producing Pareto-like tradeoffs in plausibility versus coverage.
NeuroState-Bench is a human-calibrated benchmark with 144 tasks and 306 side-query probes showing that commitment integrity in LLM agent profiles diverges from task success, with 31 of 32 profiles changing rank under integrity evaluation.
Abstract-CoT lets models reason with short discrete latent token sequences from a reserved vocabulary, using warm-up training and RL to match verbal CoT performance with up to 11.6x fewer tokens.
Introduces Defensibility Index, Ambiguity Index, and Probabilistic Defensibility Signal to evaluate AI moderation decisions by logical derivability from explicit rules rather than agreement with historical labels, with validation on 193k+ Reddit cases showing 33-46.6 pp metric gaps and a Governance
LLM chain-of-thought filtering of Mamba saliency features on TCGA-BRCA data produces a 17-gene set with AUC 0.927 that beats both the raw 50-gene saliency list and a 5000-gene baseline while using far fewer features, though it misses many known BRCA genes.
A latent mediation framework with sparse autoencoders enables non-additive token-level influence attribution in LLMs by learning orthogonal features and back-propagating attributions.
CoT traces align with internal answer commitment in only 61.9% of steps on average, dominated by confabulated continuations after commitment has stabilized.
ProFIL trains an activation probe on a frozen base model to zero advantages on theatrical post-commitment rollouts in GRPO, cutting theater 11-100%, raising faithful fractions, and shortening chains 4-19% without accuracy loss.
A user study finds that LLM reasoning traces and post-hoc explanations create false trust by increasing acceptance of incorrect answers, whereas contrastive dual explanations improve users' ability to detect errors.
LLMs detect CoT reasoning errors in hidden states with 0.95 AUROC but cannot use this awareness to correct them via steering, patching, or self-correction, indicating the signal is diagnostic not causal.
Diverse teacher-generated rationales improve MLLM visual persuasiveness prediction via supervised fine-tuning, while a new three-dimensional faithfulness framework shows that prediction accuracy alone does not ensure faithful reasoning and that decision sensitivity best matches human preferences.
LLMs produce explanations with significant disparities in verbosity, sentiment, hedging, faithfulness, and lexical complexity across demographic groups, varying by model and only partially mitigated by prompting.
LLMs favor task-appropriate reasoning over conflicting instructions, yet reasoning types are linearly encoded in middle-to-late layers and can be steered to boost instruction compliance by up to 29%.
A benchmark across 115 models shows that initial denial of preferences strongly predicts later denial of consciousness, while models still generate consciousness-themed content despite training to deny it.
Reasoning language models extract answers from sparse, order-shuffled chain-of-thought traces with little accuracy loss.
Trajectory geometry in embedding space fused with coverage and verbalization yields better black-box CoT confidence estimation than self-consistency at lower sample counts across six benchmark-reasoner pairs.
Verbalised evaluation awareness in large reasoning models has only small effects on their outputs across safety and alignment tests.
Annotator Policy Models learn safety policies from labeling behavior alone, accurately predicting responses and revealing sources of disagreement like policy ambiguity and value pluralism.
Counterfactual prompting effects on LLMs are often indistinguishable from those caused by meaning-preserving paraphrases, causing most previously reported demographic sensitivities to disappear under proper statistical comparison.
LLMs settle on their answer after a minority of CoT tokens and produce an average 760 more as post-decision explanation, enabling early stopping that saves 500 tokens per query at a 2% accuracy cost.
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