Di Mu

From Decorative to Load-Bearing: Task Difficulty Shapes the Causal Role of Chain-of-Thought

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is only meaningful if written reasoning causally constrains the answer. We introduce continuation-based causal testing, an ablation-patch intervention that perturbs one reasoning step, truncates the chain, and forces the model to continue from the corrupted prefix. It measures how load...