Reasoning Stabilization Point: A Training-Time Signal for Stable Evidence and Shortcut Reliance

Abstract

Fine-tuning pretrained language models can improve task performance while subtly altering the evidence a model relies on. We propose a training-time interpretability view that tracks token-level attributions across finetuning epochs. We define explanation driftas the epoch-to-epoch change in normalized token attributions on a fixed probe set, and introduce the Reasoning Stabilization Point(RSP), the earliest epoch after which drift remains consistently low. RSP is computed from within-run drift dynamics and requires no tuning on out-of-distribution data. Across multiple lightweight transformer classifiers and benchmark classification tasks, drift typically collapses into a low, stable regime early in training, while validation accuracy continues to change only marginally. In a controlled shortcut setting with label-correlated trigger tokens, attribution dynamics expose increasing reliance on the shortcut even when validation accuracy remains competitive. Overall, explanation drift provides a simple, low-cost diagnostic for monitoring how decision evidence evolves during fine-tuning and for selecting checkpoints in a stable-evidence regime.

8 pages, Submitted to ACL Rolling Review and is under review