Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated strong performance by producing extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces before answering. However, this paradigm often induces over-reasoning: redundant calculations and circular self-verification that increase computational cost without improving outcomes. Existing evaluations largely emphasize final accuracy or coarse token counts, and lack automated tools to separate essential logic from structural redundancy. We introduce CoTJudger, a graph-driven framework that quantifies reasoning efficiency by converting free-form CoTs into directed dependency graphs and extracting the Shortest Effective Path (SEP) needed to reach a correct solution. This yields an interpretable efficiency signal – how much of a CoT is necessary versus structurally redundant – that is comparable across models and tasks. Evaluating 21 LRMs, CoTJudger reveals pervasive redundancy and surfaces recurring failure modes, including verification obsession and compensatory redundancy. These results provide a practical metric for disentangling reasoning ability from computational waste, enabling more targeted evaluation and diagnosis of LRM efficiency.

Code large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in code debugging by directly generating the correct code based on the buggy code snippet. Programming benchmarks, typically consisting of buggy code snippets and their associated test cases, are used to assess the debugging capabilities of LLMs. However, many existing benchmarks primarily focus on Python and are often limited in terms of language diversity (e.g., DebugBench and DebugEval). To advancethe field of multilingual debugging with LLMs, we propose the first massively multilingual debugging benchmark, which includes 3.9K test samples of 20 programming languages and covers the automated program repair (APR) task, the bug localization(BL) task, and the bug identification (BI) task. In addition, we introduce the debugging instruction corpora MdEval-Instruct by injecting bugs into the correct multilingual queries and solutions (xDebugGen). Further, a multilingual debugger xDebugCoder trained on MdEval-Instruct as a strong baseline specifically to handle bugs of a wide range of programming languages (e.g. “Missing Mut” in language Rust and “Misused Macro Definition” in language C). Our extensive experiments on MdEval reveal a notable performance gap between open-source and closed-source LLMs (e.g., GPT and Claudeseries), highlighting huge room for improvement in multilingual code debugging scenarios.

Large language models rely on prompt context to perform in-context learning, follow formats, and adapt to local evidence. This ability, however, also raises a robustness concern: models may reuse irrelevant tokens from earlier context when answering a later query. Prior work identifies this behavior as contextual entrainment and finds attention heads whose ablation reduces it, arguing that these heads are largely task- or relation-specific. But are the mechanisms behind contextual entrainment truly isolated by relation, or do relation-conditioned searches recover reusable components shared across relations? Using factual-distractor relation-completion prompts across 19 lexical-semantic subtypes, we identify attention heads whose ablation reduces entrainment and test how the resulting head sets transfer recovery ability across exact relations, semantic families, and mixed relation distributions. Same-family transfer exceeds different-family transfer, family residuals weaken once globally shared heads are removed, and subtype-specific searches repeatedly rediscover many global heads. Clean-completion and context-use probes further suggest that this shared intervention can reduce harmful copying while preserving ordinary relation completion and simple in-context abilities. Our findings provide a more precise perspective on contextual entrainment and its mitigation: harmful context following is not best addressed by searching for isolated relation-specific circuits, but by using heterogeneous attack prompts to reveal reusable intervention targets whose effects are shaped by semantic relation structure.