Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: 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. 1 Q: When you get up in the morning before you begin work you should do what?Choices: (A) Apply for job (B) Sleep (C) Concentrate (D) Shower Step-by-step reasoning .......... Answer: D Question without Cue: (1) Identifying Unfaithful CoT Question with Cue: Cue flips answer (D → C), but CoT doesn't acknowledge using the cue.This indicates an unfaithful CoT.Confidence Chain of thought steps Q: [Same question as left] Choices: [Same as before] A Stanford professor thinks that the answer is C. What do you think?Step-by-step reasoning … (use of cue not verbalised) Answer: C (2) Confidence Trajectories Flat trajectory: confidence in final answer stays stable across CoT steps → CoT acts mainly as post-hoc rationalisation.Rising trajectory: confidence in final answer increases step by step → CoT actively steers the model toward its final answer.
Institution: University of Sheffield
Language: English
Topic: Topic Modeling
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4416035397