arXiv:2606.05402v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) produce reasoning traces with non-linear structures, such as backtracking and self-correction, that complicate the evaluation and monitoring of the reasoning process. We introduce ReasoningFlow, a framework that captures the discourse structures of LRM reasoning traces into fine-grained directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). We develop and validate our annotation schema through careful manual annotation of 31 traces (2.1k steps), achieving high inter-annotator agreement, then scale to automatic annotation of 1,260 traces (247.7k steps) spanning three tasks (math, science, argumentation) and five models (Qwen2.5-32B-Inst, QwQ-32B, DeepSeek-V3, DeepSeek-R1, GPT-oss-120B). By analyzing ReasoningFlow graphs, we find: (1) LRMs exhibit structurally similar traces, despite being trained from different base models and potentially non-overlapping post-training data. (2) ReasoningFlow reveals diverse fine-grained reasoning behaviors (e.g., local verification, self-reflection, and assumptions) that can be used for better reasoning trace monitorability. (3) In LRMs, most of the erroneous steps are not used to derive final answers. (4) Mechanistic causal dependencies between steps do not reflect the language-level discourse structure. We release the dataset and code in: https://github.com/jinulee-v/reasoningflow.
ReasoningFlow: Discourse Structures for Understanding LLM Reasoning Traces
Researchers have developed ReasoningFlow, a framework that maps the non-linear discourse structures of large reasoning model (LRM) traces into directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to improve evaluation and monitoring. Through manual annotation of 31 traces and automatic scaling to 1,260 traces across three tasks and five models, the team found that LRMs exhibit structurally similar reasoning patterns, most erroneous steps do not contribute to final answers, and causal dependencies between steps differ from language-level discourse structure. The findings enable better trace monitorability by revealing fine-grained behaviors like local verification and self-reflection.
Run your AI side-project on zahid.host
EU-based hosting, git-push deploys, automatic HTTPS, no cold starts. Free tier with a custom domain — perfect for shipping the agent you just read about.