Paper finds CoT reasoning operations are geometrically organized in hidden states
dair_ai · x · 2026-09-08
The paper "Beneath the Surface of Chains-of-Thought" asks whether distinct reasoning operations — problem formulation, goal decomposition, deduction — are geometrically organized in hidden representations. They are: operations are separable in held-out representations, with separability peaking in middle layers. Lexical and positional confounds are ruled out; identical surface tokens get different representations depending on the surrounding operation, so geometry tracks function rather than wording. Attention masking shows operation-aligned representations at chunk start depend on preceding reasoning context — the operation label is constructed from the trace, not read off the current token.
More from Research
- HarnessMM cuts agent tokens per task by up to 88% while raising success rates — omarsar0 · 2026-10-26
- Ben Recht: The world needs a truly open language model, and it's easier to build than you think — beenwrekt · 2026-10-26
- New Blog Breaks Black-Box Distillation Into Five Practical Steps — chrisrohlf · 2026-10-26
- DetectorScope turns black-box AI text detectors into auditable ones with sparse autoencoders — _akhaliq · 2026-10-26
- OPST paper shows LLMs self-improve with zero human data, guided only by topic descriptions — _akhaliq · 2026-10-26
- Tencent's HiSTEVE 1.0: hierarchical VLA agent plays Minecraft with native keyboard and mouse, hits 85% SOTA — _akhaliq · 2026-10-26