Interventional Grounding Audits: Black-Box Premise-Dependency Tests for LLM Chain-of-Thought via Predicate Substitution

Abstract

arXiv:2607.13069v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models produce chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that appears logically sound yet may not genuinely depend on its stated premises. We introduce interventional grounding audits, a black-box, step-level test of premise dependency: we intervene on a single premise by substituting its target predicate with a fresh symbol, re-run the model, and check whether each reasoning step's normalized conclusion (canonical predicate form) changes. We