Validation of genuine cognitive mechanisms versus spurious shortcuts

Develop validation methodologies that determine whether observed reasoning patterns in large language model traces reflect genuine cognitive mechanisms rather than spurious reasoning shortcuts or memorization.

Background

The work shows that models can produce correct outputs while relying on shallow forward chaining and rigid strategies, making it unclear whether successes reflect genuine reasoning.

The authors highlight the need for principled validation to disambiguate authentic cognitive processes from artifacts of training or evaluation biases.