disabled-thinking-mode-and-short-traces-are-unreliable-proxies-for-no-thinking CLM-0513
mechanismsingle paperReviewed by AI

Evaluations that define "the model did not think" by a disabled thinking mode or by the absence of a long trace measure the wrong thing: a disabled mode may still emit reasoning in the answer, and a long trace may hold filler rather than inference; separating the pre-answer text from the answer and scoring it for emptiness, relevance to the question and explicit inference distinguishes answer-only output, relevant but non-inferential text, and genuine reasoning, which the proxies conflate.

Capability: Whether the measurement made the finding

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