Diagnosing Harmful Continuation in Answer-Correct Long-CoT Training Traces
Long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces are widely used as supervision for reasoning-oriented LLM SFT, yet answer-correct traces can still lead to markedly different fine-tuning outcomes. We study post-conclusion continuation in answer-correct long-CoT data: a continuation where the answer appears sufficiently supported, but the trace continues with additional reasoning that remains in the supervised target. To test its training effect, we use a delete-only editor to construct answer-preserving suffix removal and compare CoT-based SFT on the original and processed traces. We observe improved SFT outcomes after removing the editor-identified post-conclusion continuation, suggesting that this co...
| Authors | Chen He, Yuhao Wu, Lei Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 28 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 May 2026 |
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