Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Lewis-Lim, Samuel, Tan, Xingwei, Zhao, Zhixue, Aletras, Nikolaos
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Lewis-Lim, Samuel
Tan, Xingwei
Zhao, Zhixue
Aletras, Nikolaos
author_facet Lewis-Lim, Samuel
Tan, Xingwei
Zhao, Zhixue
Aletras, Nikolaos
contents Recent work has demonstrated that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) often yields limited gains for soft-reasoning problems such as analytical and commonsense reasoning. CoT can also be unfaithful to a model's actual reasoning. We investigate the dynamics and faithfulness of CoT in soft-reasoning tasks across instruction-tuned, reasoning and reasoning-distilled models. Our findings reveal differences in how these models rely on CoT, and show that CoT influence and faithfulness are not always aligned.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_19827
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?
Lewis-Lim, Samuel
Tan, Xingwei
Zhao, Zhixue
Aletras, Nikolaos
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Recent work has demonstrated that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) often yields limited gains for soft-reasoning problems such as analytical and commonsense reasoning. CoT can also be unfaithful to a model's actual reasoning. We investigate the dynamics and faithfulness of CoT in soft-reasoning tasks across instruction-tuned, reasoning and reasoning-distilled models. Our findings reveal differences in how these models rely on CoT, and show that CoT influence and faithfulness are not always aligned.
title Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19827