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

Samuel Lewis-Lim, Xingwei Tan, Zhixue Zhao, Nikolaos Aletras

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.

External IDs:dblp:journals/corr/abs-2508-19827