most citedPosition: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

4 citations · 4 across the 4 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

6 papers

cs.AI2026

Masked Distillation: Internalizing the Chain-of-Thought in Language Models

Durgesh Kalwar, Vardhan Palod, Subbarao Kambhampati

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time. These intermediate traces dominate latency, me…

cs.AI20264 cited

Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!

Subbarao Kambhampati, Karthik Valmeekam, Siddhant Bhambri +6

Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has become a standard method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning task…

cs.LG2026

Beyond Semantics: The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Reasonless Intermediate Tokens

Karthik Valmeekam, Vardhan Palod, Kaya Stechly +2

Recent impressive results from large reasoning models have been interpreted as a triumph of Chain of Thought (CoT), and especially of the process of training on CoTs sampled from b…

cs.HC2026

Evaluating the False Trust Engendered by LLM Explanations

Vardhan Palod, Upasana Biswas, Subbarao Kambhampati

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are increasingly used for critical tasks, yet they provide no guarantees about the correctness of their solutions. Us…

cs.AI2025

Performative Thinking? The Brittle Correlation Between CoT Length and Problem Complexity

Vardhan Palod, Karthik Valmeekam, Kaya Stechly +1

Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has been proposed as a method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tas…

q-bio.NC2025

Discounting and Drug Seeking in Biological Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning

Vardhan Palod, Pranav Mahajan, Veeky Baths +1

Despite a strong desire to quit, individuals with long-term substance use disorder (SUD) often struggle to resist drug use, even when aware of its harmful consequences. This discon…