Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful
  Post-hoc Rationalisation?
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.
68b039d1b19c5400014847de
Samuel Lewis-Lim
admin_assigned
2025-08-29T15:15:14.865Z
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Samuel Lewis-Lim
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Samll
68b039d1b19c5400014847df
Xingwei Tan
claimed_verified
2025-08-28T18:16:41.796Z
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/avatars/9534aaf81cbf12f015c6826b682fdb84.svg
Xingwei Tan
user
XingweiT
68b039d1b19c5400014847e0
Zhixue Zhao
68b039d1b19c5400014847e1
Nikolaos Aletras
Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful
  Post-hoc Rationalisation?
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.
Investigation into Chain-of-Thought dynamics and faithfulness across various models reveals inconsistencies in their reliance on CoT and its alignment with actual reasoning.
Chain-of-Thought CoT soft-reasoning analytical reasoning commonsense reasoning instruction-tuned reasoning models reasoning-distilled models