Preprint Open access
When Confidence Rises Too Early: Detecting Shortcut Reasoning via Premature Answer Commitment
The reasoning trajectory of a Large Language Model (LLM) is often treated as a verbalized description of its internal reasoning. However, such trajectories can be unfaithful: a model may rely on shortcuts to reach an answer and then post-rationalize the decision with a seemingly coherent chain of thought. Detecting thi …