Preprint Open access
Correct Answers, Invalid Traces: What Verifiable Grade-School Math Reveals About Chain-of-Thought Traces
Chain-of-thought traces are widely read as records of how models reach their answers, informing debugging, agent auditing, and claims about reasoning. Testing this interpretation is difficult because natural-language thinking traces are rarely mechanically verifiable. We revisit it in iGSM, a synthetic grade-school mat …