The Illusion of Reasoning: Exposing Evasive Data Contamination in LLMs via Zero-CoT Truncation
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities across a wide range of tasks, but data contamination undermines the objective evaluation of these capabilities. This problem is further exacerbated by malicious model publishers who use evasive, or indirect, contamination strategies, such as paraphrasing benchmark data to evade existing detection methods and artificially boost leaderboard performance. Current approaches struggle to reliably detect such stealthy contamination. In this work, we uncover a critical phenomenon: a model's generated reasoning steps actively mask its underlying memorization. Inspired by this, we propose the Zero-CoT Probe (ZCP), a novel...
| Authors | Yifan Lan, Yuanpu Cao, Hanyu Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 21 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 May 2026 |
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