Math Reasoning in LLMs is Organized by Approach, Not Topic
Mathematical reasoning benchmarks are typically organized by topic, but language models may organize their internal computation by reusable reasoning approach instead. In this paper, we investigate whether open math-capable LLMs organize internally by topical sub-skill or by reasoning approach, and we present evidence that the approach is the key. We introduce a generation-replay protocol: a model first generates a solution, after which we replay the exact prompt-plus-generation trajectory and extract activation-importance signatures over the reasoning tokens. We cluster these signatures without supervision across eight models and five mathematical reasoning sources, then evaluate the rec...
| Authors | Sajad Goudarzi, Samaneh Zamanifard, Moloud Nasiri et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 22 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 September 2026 |
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