When Reasoning Traces Become Performative: Step-Level Evidence that Chain-of-Thought Is an Imperfect Oversight Channel
Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces are increasingly used both to improve language model capability and to audit model behavior, implicitly assuming that the visible trace remains synchronized with the computation that determines the answer. We test this assumption with a step-level Detect-Classify-Compare framework built around an answer-commitment proxy that is cross-validated with Patchscopes, tuned-lens probes, and causal direction ablation. Across nine models and seven reasoning benchmarks, latent commitment and explicit answer arrival align on only 61.9% of steps on average. The dominant mismatch pattern is confabulated continuation: 58.0% of detected mismatch events occur after the answe...
| Authors | Wenkai Li, Fan Yang, Ananya Hazarika et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 12 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 May 2026 |
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