Legibility is Not Interpretability: Comparing Judged and Actual Importance in Chain-Of-Thought Reasoning

Reasoning traces from chain-of-thought models appear to offer a legible window into how a model arrives at its answer.

Reasoning traces from chain-of-thought models appear to offer a legible window into how a model arrives at its answer. A growing body of work treats them as such, using LLM judges to diagnose errors, evaluate faithfulness, and provide step-level supervision via process reward…