Effectiveness of Hidden-State Probes for Localizing Reasoning Failures
Organizations: Trinity College Dublin, Ireland · IBM Research, Dublin, Ireland · Umeå University, Sweden
Abstract
Verifying the final answer of a long reasoning trace may show that the trace is wrong but it does not distinguish three cases. The problem may lie beyond the model's capability, another attempt would succeed, or one step in an otherwise recoverable trace made the trace fail. Standard hidden-state probes are trained on final-answer correctness, a label that conflates these cases. Monte Carlo rollouts distinguish the cases and locate the failing step at additional inference cost. We test the hidden states of 4B and 8B reasoning models for the failure type and the failing step and compare each probe with the strongest baseline that uses no hidden states. On incorrect 8B traces, the confidence probe, a calibrated correctness probe at a midpoint cutoff, misses 81% of cases in which a single step makes the trace unrecoverable and 47% of cases in which another attempt would succeed. A probe with a different training design over the same states reverses the ordering of these two kinds of failure, so either ordering can be read from those states. At both scales, no single tested probe locates the failing step more accurately than a rule based only on trace length, and at 4B a probe trained to predict that step fails to outperform this rule in any of 10 runs on identical traces. The confidence probe therefore indicates that an answer is wrong, but its failure-type ordering depends on its training design.
Figures & tables
Appendix figures & tables14 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Claim | Supporting evidence | Verdict | Nearest prior work | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best reachable value partitions incorrect traces into capability gaps, pit s, and near misses | (4B) and (8B); recoverable and ; the shares change by less than two percentage points for between and , while raises the share of capability gaps to and | Descriptive result under one decoding setting | [ Hwang et al., 2024 , Setlur et al., 2024 , Li, 2026 , Ahdritz et al., 2024 ] | Separates pit s from near misses among recoverable traces |
| The confidence probe predicts final correctness and remains calibrated | Detection AUROC and over 5 seeds; after controls and ; ECE / (Table 13 ); the text baseline reaches at 4B and at 8B | Supported for prediction and calibration; the probe exceeds the text baseline by less than the margin | [ Azaria and Mitchell, 2023 , Kadavath et al., 2022 , Yuan et al., 2025 , Yuan et al., 2026 ] | A step-level probe with a causal attention mask and surface-feature controls |
| Miss rates at the cutoff differ by failure type | Miss rates (4B) and (8B); difference between pit s and near misses after controls and (Table 11 ) | Supported at 8B; partial at 4B , where the difference between pit s and near misses after controls is nonzero, its interval does not reach the minimum effect, and the confidence probe trained with the Brier loss gives | [ Yuan et al., 2026 ] | Breaks down misses by failure type |
| Probes with different training designs recover opposite failure-type orderings | AUROC of pit s against near misses: confidence probe , combined probe (4B/8B), each on its own held-out traces | Opposite orderings under partially matched training designs; the contribution of the target alone is open | [ Yu et al., 2024 , Lu et al., 2024 ] | Compares two training designs on the same hidden states at the same read site |
| A failure-type classifier on transcoder activations of one completed incorrect trace per problem separates capability-gap problems from pit problems | Difference from the strongest tested baseline that uses no hidden states (8B) and (4B), mean over six repetitions of five-fold cross-validation; every interval excludes zero and contains the margin; the same classifier on hidden states scores lower (Appendix B.1 ) | Meets the margin at 8B, not at 4B; a difference between the scales is not established; applies after a trace has ended | [ Orgad et al., 2025 , Zhang et al., 2025b , Kantamneni et al., 2025 ] | Separates capability gaps from pit s; the confidence probe’s miss rates do not separate these two types |
| No single tested probe exceeds the length rule at locating the pit step; at 8B only the value probe was tested | Pointer probe versus length rule , above the length rule in of runs; pointer probe trained without gold problems versus , of ; ensemble with inverse-frequency weights on the failure-type loss, interval containing zero with uniform weights; final-label comparison: the value probe and the final-label probe are below the length rule in every seed on the problems held out from the value probe’s training; pooled over all reference pit steps, which include training traces, the two probes score above the length rule in of runs (Table 12 ); 8B value probe with the two input sets and versus length rule , above the length rule in of seeds for each input set (Table 10 ) | Negative result at 4B, paired on identical pit s, and at 8B, compared through seed means against the pit steps of the broad collection. Earlier configurations evaluated on to pit s are inconclusive | [ Zheng et al., 2025 , Alvarez and Baheri, 2026 , Zhao et al., 2026b , Cui et al., 2026 , Nadaf, 2026 ] | Uses a continuation-based pit -step target and refits the length rule for each evaluation set |
| broad collection | gold collection | ||
| 4B | 8B | 4B | |
| evaluated steps | 0, 1, 2, then every second step | ||
| rollouts per prefix in the scan | 8 | 8 | 4 |
| rollouts per prefix in the refinement | 16 | 16 | 8 |
| evaluated prefixes with the scan’s rollouts | |||
| evaluated prefixes with the refinement’s rollouts | |||
| model | target | training traces | mask | scales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| confidence probe | final label , broadcast to every step | all traces | causal | 4B, 8B |
| value probe | rollout rate at each step | recoverable traces | bidirectional | 4B, 8B |
| combined probe | on correct traces, on incorrect ones | traces (21 incorrect traces without rollout rates dropped) | bidirectional | 4B, 8B |
| pointer probe | pit step; further outputs, including the failure type | incorrect traces of the broad collection, of which pit s | bidirectional | 4B |
| failure-type classifier | failure type of the problem, capability gap or pit | one scored trace per problem | — | 4B, 8B |
| 4B | 8B | |
| pre-norm encoder layers | 4 | |
| width | 512 | |
| attention heads | 8 | |
| maximum number of steps | 48 | |
| input dimension per step | ||
| parameters | 15.5M | 17.1M |
| 4B | 8B | |
| detection AUROC | ||
| AUROC after controls | ||
| ECE | ||
| miss rate, capability gap | ||
| miss rate, pit | ||
| miss rate, near miss |
| labels | scale | problems | classifier | hidden states | strongest baseline | difference | repetitions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| stored | 4B | 1,722 | 0.667 | 0.580 | 0.618 | 3 of 6 | |
| stored | 8B | 6,372 | 0.721 | 0.646 | 0.666 | 6 of 6 | |
| defects removed | 4B | 1,294 | 0.643 | 0.581 | 0.578 | 6 of 6 | |
| defects removed | 8B | 5,078 | 0.700 | 0.638 | 0.617 | 6 of 6 |
| repetition | 4B | 8B |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| 2 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| 3 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| 4 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| 5 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| 6 | [ , ] | [ , ] |
| problem type | 4B problems | 4B share | 8B problems | 8B share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DeepMath topics | ||||
| Algebra | 4,136 | 0.563 [0.549, 0.577] | 3,728 | 0.537 [0.522, 0.552] |
| Calculus | 2,564 | 0.511 [0.494, 0.530] | 2,256 | 0.477 [0.457, 0.497] |
| Other | 928 | 0.542 [0.513, 0.572] | 826 | 0.510 [0.478, 0.541] |
| Discrete Mathematics | 890 | 0.603 [0.573, 0.632] | 801 | 0.599 [0.564, 0.627] |
| Geometry | 856 | 0.555 [0.524, 0.584] | 769 | 0.535 [0.506, 0.569] |
| set | population | used for | 4B | 8B |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| all traces | every sampled trace (35,854 problems) | training the confidence and combined probes | 144,000 | 144,000 |
| held-out traces | traces whose problems were held out by at least one of the five training seeds | detection and calibration of the confidence probe | 119,736 | 119,756 |
| broad collection | every incorrect trace | shares of the failure types (Figure 2 ) | 28,699 | 24,871 |
| held-out incorrect traces | incorrect traces among the held-out traces | miss rates by failure type (Section 3 ) | 23,837 | 20,590 |
| held-out pit s | pit s of problems outside the training split | pointer probe (4B); value probe, per seed (8B) | 2,289 | 2,805–2,918 |
| classifier problems | one incorrect trace per problem, capability gaps and pit s | failure-type classifier (Appendix B.1 ) | 1,722 | 6,372 |
| measurement | 4B | 8B | interpretation |
| Failure types and detection | |||
| detection AUROC of the read site a | 0.7245 [0.7047, 0.7432] | 0.7149 [0.6960, 0.7326] | read site chosen from the final label only |
| share of pit s whose pit step equals | 0.154 | 0.125 | the step equals the pit step for a minority of pit s |
| combined probe confidence probe, detection AUROC on held-out problems | [ , ] | [ , ] | the confidence probe has the higher detection AUROC |
| confidence probe’s predicted correctness at the pit step minus other steps b | [ , ] | [ , ] | lower at the pit step |
| same difference against the position-matched steps b | [ , ] | [ , ] | 8B: the decrease remains; 4B: no detected difference |
| quantity | 4B | 8B |
|---|---|---|
| miss rate, capability gap | ||
| miss rate, pit | ||
| miss rate, near miss | ||
| (incorrect traces) | 23,837 | 20,590 |
| , pit s | (3,160) | (2,548) |
| near misses | (78) | (118) |
| comparison | pit s | probe | length rule | difference | runs above rule |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| pointer probe, held-out pit s of the broad collection a | 2,289 | 0.4692 | [ , ] | 0 of 10 | |
| pointer probe trained without gold problems | 818 | 0.4462 | [ , ] | 0 of 5 | |
| final-label comparison, held-out: value probe b | 205–242 | 0.3640; 0.3402 | 0.4812 | to ; to | 0 of 10 |
| final-label comparison, held-out: final-label probe b | 205–242 | 0.3041; 0.3423 | 0.4812 | to ; to | 0 of 10 |
| final-label comparison, pooled, training traces included c | 818 | 0.3186–0.3795 | 0.4462 | to | 0 of 20 |
| scale | loss | AUROC | AUROC after controls | ECE | ECE after scaling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4B | BCE (main) | ||||
| 8B | BCE (main) | ||||
| 4B | Brier (robustness) | ||||
| 8B | Brier (robustness) |
Hidden-State Probing
Hidden-state probing reads model activations to study what they represent and whether those signals support monitoring or control.
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