Thoughts without Thinking: Reconsidering the Explanatory Value of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs through Agentic Pipelines

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00875v1
• Date: Thu, 01 May 2025 21:37:30 GMT
• Title: Thoughts without Thinking: Reconsidering the Explanatory Value of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMs through Agentic Pipelines
• Authors: Ramesh Manuvinakurike, Emanuel Moss, Elizabeth Anne Watkins, Saurav Sahay, Giuseppe Raffa, Lama Nachman,
• Abstract summary: Agentic pipelines present novel challenges and opportunities for human-centered explainability.<n>We present early findings from an agentic pipeline implementation of a perceptive task guidance system.
• Score: 8.72060285437636
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Agentic pipelines present novel challenges and opportunities for human-centered explainability. The HCXAI community is still grappling with how best to make the inner workings of LLMs transparent in actionable ways. Agentic pipelines consist of multiple LLMs working in cooperation with minimal human control. In this research paper, we present early findings from an agentic pipeline implementation of a perceptive task guidance system. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we analyze how Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, a common vehicle for explainability in LLMs, operates within agentic pipelines. We demonstrate that CoT reasoning alone does not lead to better outputs, nor does it offer explainability, as it tends to produce explanations without explainability, in that they do not improve the ability of end users to better understand systems or achieve their goals.

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