arxiv
PublishedMay 25, 2026 at 4:00 AM
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The Readout Shortcut: Positional Number Copying Dominates Arithmetic CoT Readout in Small Language Models
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arXiv:2605.22870v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is necessary for arithmetic in small language models, yet shuffling its steps preserves most performance. What does CoT contribute if not logical sequencing? In three 1-3B instruction-tuned LMs on GSM8K, we isolate th
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Originally published on arxiv ↗