How Hard Does It Think? Analyzing Step-Aware Reasoning Energy in LLM Chain-of-Thought Trajectories

Abstract

arXiv:2607.28674v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Understanding how computational effort is allocated across individual chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning steps remains an open challenge: existing interpretability methods rely on output-level signals or collapse processing depth into a single trajectory-level scalar, leaving step-wise effort opaque. We propose Step-Aware Reasoning Energy (SARE), a geometric framework that quantifies effort at the granularity of individual CoT steps via Centered Kern