The Geometry of Self-Verification in a Task-Specific Reasoning Model

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission13320 Authors

Keywords: mechanistic interpretability, reasoning models

TL;DR: We reverse-engineer how reasoning models verify their own answers.

Abstract: How do reasoning models verify their own answers? We study this question by training a model using DeepSeek R1's recipe on the CountDown task. We leverage the fact that preference tuning leads to mode collapse, yielding a model that always produces highly structured chain-of-thought sequences. With this setup, we do top-down and bottom-up analyses to reverse-engineer how the model verifies its outputs. Top-down, we find Gated Linear Unit (GLU) weights encoding verification-related tokens, such as success'' or incorrect''. Bottom-up, we find that ``previous-token heads'' are mainly responsible for self-verification in our setup. Our analyses meet in the middle: drawing inspiration from inter-layer communication channels, we use the identified GLU weights to localize as few as three attention heads that can disable self-verification, pointing to a necessary component of a potentially larger verification circuit. Finally, we verify that similar verification components exist in our base model and a general reasoning R1 model.

Primary Area: interpretability and explainable AI

Submission Number: 13320