Morning Edition · Tuesday, July 21, 2026Published at 1:32 AM EDT · New York
A Paper Finds Open-Weight Models Commit to Answers Before They Reason
Researchers report behavioral and preliminary activation-level evidence that a model settles on a reply, then generates a chain of thought to justify it.
A new arXiv paper probes a failure that undercuts the premise of chain-of-thought reasoning. Chat models sometimes commit to an answer first and then produce reasoning that justifies it, even when the answer contradicts the task's premise.…
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