Related: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces![1]

> Our findings consistently challenge the prevailing narrative that intermediate tokens constitute a semantically meaningful reasoning process. First, we observe a pronounced lack of correlation between solution correctness and trace validity—models frequently produce invalid reasoning traces even when they arrive at correct solutions. Second, and more strikingly, models trained on corrupted or semantically irrelevant traces achieve performance comparable to, and often exceeding, that of models trained on correct traces, especially on out-of-distribution tasks.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09762

Also posted to HN today with a couple comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49360140#49363374

The author of this paper is in ASU and does a lot of excellent work in this space. People should check it out. Especially the paper titled "Beyond Semantics..." His twitter is also active _and_ high SNR.

Related: Poster side dialogue and Q&A about this work at ICML. Very good. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49277303