Beneath the Surface of Chains-of-Thought: A Mechanistic Interpretation of Reasoning Operations in LLMs

arXiv:2609.04753v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning in large language models unfolds through diverse functional operations, such as problem formulation, goal decomposition, and deduction. Although these operations are explicitly distinguished in text, little is known about how they are geometrically organized in representation spaces. To this end, we investigate whether distinct reasoning operations exhibit corresponding geometric structure in hidden representations. We find that operations are separable in held-out representations, with separability peaking in middle layers, and verify that this structure is not explained by lexical or positional confounds. Across layers, token-wise operation-alignment becomes more distributed over spans, while identical surface tokens are represented differently depending on the operation of its surrounding chunk. Attention-masking interventions further show that operation-aligned representations at chunk onset depend on preceding reasoning context. Consequently, our work demonstrates that language models maintain representational correspondence between linguistic reasoning expressions and their internal geometric structures. Code and project materials are available at https://github.com/naver-ai/beneath-cot.

Abstract:Reasoning in large language models unfolds through diverse functional operations, such as problem formulation, goal decomposition, and deduction. Although these operations are explicitly distinguished in text, little is known about how they are geometrically organized in representation spaces. To this end, we investigate whether distinct reasoning operations exhibit corresponding geometric structure in hidden representations. We find that operations are separable in held-out representations, with separability peaking in middle layers, and verify that this structure is not explained by lexical or positional confounds. Across layers, token-wise operation-alignment becomes more distributed over spans, while identical surface tokens are represented differently depending on the operation of its surrounding chunk. Attention-masking interventions further show that operation-aligned representations at chunk onset depend on preceding reasoning context. Consequently, our work demonstrates that language models maintain representational correspondence between linguistic reasoning expressions and their internal geometric structures. Code and project materials are available at this https URL.

To appear in EMNLP 2026 Main Conference. 43 pages, 14 figures, 19 tables

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2609.04753 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2609.04753v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.04753 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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Beneath the Surface of Chains-of-Thought: A Mechanistic Interpretation of Reasoning Operations in LLMs

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