From Concept Alignment to Causal Grounding: An Intervention Test of Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness

Abstract

Chain-of-thought (CoT) can sound plausible yet be unfaithful to the model's underlying reasoning. Most prior work probes CoT faithfulness through input--output behavior or input attributions, leaving internal computation largely underexplored. We instead cast faithfulness as internal concept grounding: Does a large language model's (LLM) CoT reasoning engage the same internal concepts that support the LLM's direct prediction, and do the shared concepts causally drive its answer? Encoding a prediction pass and a CoT pass with a single shared sparse autoencoder (SAE), a reliable approximator of the latent concepts LLMs use, makes their internal concepts directly comparable. We introduce three correlational metrics of concept-level alignment and a causal metric, $\Delta p$, which ablates the shared concepts and measures the drop in answer probability. Across five LLMs and four datasets, concept alignment is generally high, as indicated by the correlational metrics; yet these only identify which concepts are shared, not how much they causally contribute. $\Delta p$ fills this gap: causal faithfulness varies substantially with model depth, peaking at mid-to-late layers rather than the final ones, and model scale reshapes the layer-wise profile. Moreover, causally important shared concepts are not always verbalized in the CoT. These dissociations suggest that faithfulness cannot be reliably assessed from surface-level or representational correspondence alone; assessing it requires causal tests of whether the internal concepts underlying a CoT actually drive the model's prediction.