Have you tested moving the "reason" field before the "class" field? That may encourage better CoT instead of having the model justify the class after it already

Have you tested moving the "reason" field before the "class" field? That may encourage better CoT instead of having the model justify the class after it already picked it. Anecdotally, I saw a 5% boost in performance from a NER system from having the model output the entity's class at the end rather than the beginning.