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

Samuel Lewis-Lim, Xingwei Tan, Zhixue Zhao, Nikolaos Aletras

Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?: 20 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #4 of 17 papers on 2025-08-28. Day-by-day upvote history. It lost 13 votes when the Hub removed votes in bulk.

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.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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