What Does Chain-of-Thought Entropy Measure? A Channel Audit of Scaffolding, Routing, and Content
Entropy over chain-of-thought tokens decides which tokens receive the policy gradient, which get pruned, and whether a run has collapsed, yet each such statistic reads a next-token distribution mixing three choices: whether to emit connective scaffolding, which connective, and what the substantive continuation should be. Designating a scaffold vocabulary subset separates the three, exactly, for entropy, Kullback--Leibler divergence, and the first-order entropy velocity of a softmax policy. We prove the raw and content conventions disagree about which position is the larger fork on an explicit open region, and bound answer diversity by the content channel plus a leakage term a measured wit...
| Authors | Marios Papamichalis, Regina Ruane |
|---|---|
| Primary category | stat.ML |
| Published | 26 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 August 2026 |
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