Does the Evidence a Model Cites Drive Its Conclusion? A Pre-registered Causal Test of Declared Evidence Relations in Structured Reasoning Traces
When a language model writes down its reasoning, does the evidence it cites actually drive the conclusion it states? We contribute a reproducible method for testing causal alignment between declared trace relations and model computation, and a pre-registered application to Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct on a controlled comparison...