Computation, Not Memory: Chain-of-Thought and State Tracking in LLM Agents
Language-model agents often reason before they act, and the value of monitoring that reasoning depends on how it relates to their actions. We ask how an agent's actions depend on its reasoning when the correct action depends on a changing state. In a small file-system task, background events announce which file's lock has been toggled but not its new value. The agent therefore has to reconstruct the current locks from its history before it can move files safely. With Qwen3-8B and Qwen3.5-9B, we separate two roles of reasoning: generating it before each action, and retaining earlier reasoning in the prompt. Most of the reduction in lock-violating commands comes from reasoning written at th...
| Authors | Pedram Mouseli, Massieh Moayedi |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 19 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 19 October 2026 |
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