Towards Better Chain-of-Thought: A Reflection on Effectiveness and Faithfulness

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission1089 Authors

Abstract:

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks.
Previous work attempts to evaluate it but falls short in providing an in-depth analysis of patterns that influence the CoT. In this paper, we study the CoT performance from the perspective of effectiveness and faithfulness. For the former, we identify key factors that influence CoT effectiveness on performance improvement, including problem difficulty, information gain, and information flow. For the latter, we interpret the unfaithful CoT issue by conducting a joint analysis of the information interaction among the question, CoT, and answer. The result demonstrates that, when the LLM predicts answers, it can recall correct information missing in the CoT from the question, leading to the problem. Finally, we propose a novel algorithm to mitigate this issue, in which we recall extra information from the question to enhance the CoT generation and evaluate CoTs based on their information gain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach enhances both the faithfulness and effectiveness of CoT.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Question Answering

Research Area Keywords: reasoning, logical reasoning, explanation faithfulness

Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, NLP engineering experiment

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 1089