Reasoning Theater: Disentangling Model Beliefs from Chain-of-Thought

arXiv:2603.05488v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We provide evidence of performative chain-of-thought (CoT) in reasoning models, where a model becomes strongly confident in its final answer, but continues generating tokens without revealing its internal belief. Our analysis compares activation probing, early forced answering, and a CoT monitor across two large models (DeepSeek-R1 671B & GPT-OSS 120B) and find task difficulty-specific differences: The model's final answer is decodable from activations far earlier in CoT than a monitor is able to say, especially for easy recall-based MM

Source: arXiv cs.LG — read the full report at the original publisher.

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