Max Loeffler

Authored papers (1)

• Reasoning Theater: Disentangling Model Beliefs from Chain-of-Thought2026

  Reasoning models generate chains of thought that are frequently performative rather than causally necessary for reaching the correct answer: on MMLU recall questions, activation probes decode the model's final answer from internal representations far earlier in the chain-of-thought than a CoT language monitor can, demonstrating that the visible reasoning tokens are generated after the belief is already settled. Tested across DeepSeek-R1 671B and GPT-OSS 120B using three complementary methods — activation probing, early forced answering, and a CoT monitor — the analysis reveals a task-difficulty gradient: the gap between probe-decodable certainty and monitor-detectable certainty is large for easy MMLU items but narrows substantially for difficult GPQA-Diamond multihop questions, where genuine step-by-step uncertainty persists longer. The paper introduces probe-guided early exit, which terminates generation once probe confidence passes a threshold, cutting token counts by up to 80% on MMLU and 30% on GPQA-Diamond while preserving accuracy. A key finding that complicates a purely dismissive view is that inflection-point behaviors — backtracking and 'aha' moments — appear almost exclusively in traces where probes register large belief shifts, meaning these surface signals do track genuine uncertainty rather than being uniformly theatrical. The paper argues that this dissociation between internal belief and continued CoT generation is systematic and exploitable, positioning attention probing as both a diagnostic instrument for faithfulness research and a practical mechanism for adaptive computation.

More papers — OpenAlex / S2

Their work is cited by (1)

• Persona Non Grata: Single-Method Safety Evaluation Is Incomplete for Persona-Imbued LLMs2× refs

Recent mentions (2)

• papers-typed

  boppana-2026-reasoning.md
• papers-typed

  boppana-goodfire-reasoning-theater-2026.md