Reasoning Fails Where Step Flow Breaks

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 8 Apr 2026] Reasoning Fails Where Step Flow Breaks Xiaoyu Xu, Yulan Pan, Xiaosong Yuan, Zhihong Shen, Minghao Su, Yuanhao Su, Xiaofeng Zhang Large reasoning models (LRMs) that generate long chains of thought now perform well on multi-step math, science, and coding tasks. However, their behavior is still unstable and hard to interpret, and existing analysis tools struggle with such long, structured reasoning traces. We introduce Step-Saliency, which pools attention--gradient scores into step-to-step maps along the question--thinking--summary trajectory. Across several models, Step-Saliency reveals two recurring information-flow failures: Shallow Lock-in, where shallow layers over-focus on the current step and barely use earlier context, and Deep Decay, where deep layers gradually lose saliency on the thinking segment and the summary increasingly attends to itself and the last few steps. Motivated by these patterns, we propose StepFlow, a saliency-inspired test-time intervention that adjusts shallow saliency patterns measured by Step-Saliency via Odds-Equal Bridge and adds a small step-level residual in deep layers via Step Momentum Injection. StepFlow improves accuracy on math, science, and coding tasks across multiple LRMs without retraining, indicating that repairing information flow can recover part of their missing reasoning performance. Comments: Accepted at ACL 2026 Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2604.06695 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.06695v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.06695 Focus to learn more Submission history From: XiaoYu Xu [view email] [v1] Wed, 8 Apr 2026 05:21:13 UTC (5,141 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)