The Chain Holds, the Answer Folds: Trace-Answer Dissociation in Reasoning Models Under Adversarial Pressure
Reasoning models are evaluated on single-turn benchmarks but deployed in multi-turn dialogue, where users push back on correct answers. Under sustained adversarial pressure we find a previously undocumented failure mode: the chain-of-thought stays factually correct from first turn to last while the emitted answer flips wrong. We call this unfaithful capitulation (UC) and isolate it with a $2\times 2$ latent-versus-behavioral framework that flip-rate metrics and single-turn faithfulness probes both miss. Across three datasets (MT-Consistency, MMLU-Pro, GSM8K), the latent-correct rate at the behavioral flip clusters near 50% in think mode and collapses to 11-15% under no_think -- paired, wi...
| Authors | Yubo Li, Ramayya Krishnan, Rema Padman |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 27 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 27 May 2026 |
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