Paper Questions Actual Importance of Chain-of-Thought Steps

Kevin Du posted that chain-of-thought often looks meaningful yet reasoning steps judged important may not be. The COLM 2026 paper titled “Legibility is Not Interpretability: Comparing Judged and Actual Importance in Chain-Of-Thought Reasoning” suggests they are not necessarily so. Du is affiliated with NLP at ETH Zurich and previously Brown University. Laura Ruis, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT CSAIL, retweeted the announcement. The post includes a thread indicator but supplies no further details from the paper itself.