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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19827v1
• Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2025 12:25:29 GMT
• Title: Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?
• Authors: Samuel Lewis-Lim, Xingwei Tan, Zhixue Zhao, Nikolaos Aletras,
• Abstract summary: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) often yields limited gains for soft-reasoning problems.<n>We investigate the dynamics and faithfulness of CoT in soft-reasoning tasks across instruction-tuned, reasoning and reasoning-distilled models.
• Score: 32.02698064940949
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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