Analysing Chain of Thought Dynamics: Active Guidance or Unfaithful Post-hoc Rationalisation?
Samuel Lewis-Lim, Xingwei Tan, Zhixue Zhao, Nikolaos Aletras
8/27/2025
cs.AIcs.CL
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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.
