# Towards a Mechanistic Interpretation of Multi-Step Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models

Authors: Yifan Hou, Jiaoda Li, Yu Fei, Alessandro Stolfo, Wangchunshu Zhou, Guangtao Zeng, Antoine Bosselut, Mrinmaya Sachan.

Uses mechanistic analysis to identify internal components involved in multi-step reasoning and test their causal roles.

First public: 2023-10-23.
ArXiv initial submission: 2023-10-23.

[Original paper](https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.14491) · [Reading-list entry](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2310.14491/)
[Preprint BibTeX](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2310.14491/citation.bib) · [Preprint CSL-JSON](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2310.14491/citation.csl.json) · [JSON record](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/papers/2310.14491/record.json)

## Approaches

- [Analysis and evaluation](https://latent-implicit-thinking.github.io/topics/implicit-reasoning-evaluation/): Measure how well these methods work, investigate what their internal computation does, and identify where they fail. This includes experiments, studies of model internals, and mathematical results.

Summary and categories are editorial. Read the original paper to verify claims and limitations. A citation to a paper does not, by itself, establish that a later method builds on it.

Reading-list version 0.9.5; literature checked through 2026-10-18.