2026
Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!
Subbarao Kambhampati, Karthik Valmeekam, Siddhant Bhambri, Vardhan Palod, Lucas Saldyt, Kaya Stechly +3
ICML 2026poster
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 tasks. These intermediate tokens have been called \say{reasoning traces} or even \say{thoughts} -- implicitly anthropomorphi…