{"paper":{"title":"Measuring and Mitigating Post-hoc Rationalization in Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":[],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Chen Yang, Guangyue Peng, Houfeng Wang, Ran Le, Ruixiang Feng, Tao Zhang, Wei Li, Wen Luo, Yang Song, Yuntao Wen, Zhenwei An, Zongchao Chen","submitted_at":"2026-02-16T05:13:06Z","abstract_excerpt":"Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation (RCG) synthesizes reasoning traces from query-answer pairs, but it risks producing post-hoc rationalizations: when models can see the answer during generation, the answer serves as a cognitive anchor that shapes the entire explanation. We formalize this phenomenon through a three-level measurement hierarchy: lexical, entropic, and probabilistic anchoring, which capture surface artifacts, entropy dynamics, and latent answer dependence, respectively. We analyze semantic suppression, the intuitive mitigation strategy that instructs models to ignore the answer, "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2602.14469","kind":"arxiv","version":2},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2602.14469/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}