Sheldon Yu
2025
Explainable Chain-of-Thought Reasoning: An Empirical Analysis on State-Aware Reasoning Dynamics
Sheldon Yu
|
Yuxin Xiong
|
Junda Wu
|
Xintong Li
|
Tong Yu
|
Xiang Chen
|
Ritwik Sinha
|
Jingbo Shang
|
Julian McAuley
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting have demonstrated the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning. While prior work focuses on improving CoT generation quality or attributing token-level importance, we propose a novel framework to structurally analyze the latent dynamics of CoT trajectories for interpretability. Our method segments generated CoT into discrete reasoning steps, abstracts each step into a spectral embedding based on the eigenvalues of token-level Gram matrices, and clusters these embeddings into semantically meaningful latent states. We model the global evolution of reasoning as a first-order Markov chain over latent clusters, yielding interpretable transition structures. Through t-SNE visualizations and Monte Carlo rollouts, we uncover consistent trajectories across tasks and models, supporting the hypothesis that LLM reasoning follows globally coherent yet abstract paths.
Search
Fix author
Co-authors
- Xiang Chen 1
- Xintong Li 1
- Julian McAuley 1
- Jingbo Shang 1
- Ritwik Sinha 1
- show all...