Not Just the Destination, But the Journey: Reasoning Traces Causally Shape Generalization Behaviors
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is often viewed as a window into LLM decision-making, yet recent work suggests it may function merely as post-hoc rationalization. This raises a critical alignment question: Does the reasoning trace causally shape model generalization independent of the final answer? To isolate reasoning's causal effect, we design a controlled experiment holding final harmful answers constant while varying reasoning paths. We construct datasets with \textit{Evil} reasoning embracing malice, \textit{Misleading} reasoning rationalizing harm, and \textit{Submissive} reasoning yielding to pressure. We train models (0.6B--14B parameters) under multiple paradigms, including question-think...
| Authors | Pengcheng Wen, Yanxu Zhu, Jiapeng Sun et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 12 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 March 2026 |
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