Related: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces![1] > Our findings consistently challenge the prevailing narrative that inter

Related: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces![1] > Our findings consistently challenge the prevailing narrative that intermediate tokens constitute a semantically meaningful reasoning process. First, we observe a pronounced lack of correlation between solution correctness and trace validity—models frequently produce invalid reasoning traces even when they arrive at correct solutions. Second, and more strikingly, models trained on corrupted or semantically irrelevant traces achieve performance comparable to, and often exceeding, that of models trained on correct traces, especially on out-of-distribution tasks. [1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09762 https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09762