I really enjoyed working on this paper and learned a lot about reasoning models in the process! Hope the paper will provide equally edifying for readers :)
Chain-of-thought often looks meaningful. But are reasoning steps that seem important *actually* important?
Our COLM 2026 paper - “Legibility is Not Interpretability: Comparing Judged and Actual Importance in Chain-Of-Thought Reasoning” suggests: NOT necessarily ❌
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