Are Stated Reasoning Steps Causally Load-Bearing?

arXiv cs.AISeptember 24, 2026en

arXiv cs.AI

AI Global Wire

arXiv:2609.27038v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring assumes that the reasoning a model writes reflects the computation that directly produces its answer. Previous faithfulness metrics have been predominantly behavioral, as they simply edit the reasoning text and observe the resulting answer. However, our methodology aims to measure faithfulness causally at the activation level, specifically on self-generated reasoning. Unlike previous causal audits, which measure degradation, our interventions carry a known predicted target. In this way, each patch should switch the answer to a specific counterfactual entity derivable by construction. Specifically, we use synthe

This is a short summary published by AI Global Wire. The full article is owned and hosted by arXiv cs.AI — open it there to read it in full.

• Forskning