# From Decorative to Load-Bearing: Task Difficulty Shapes the Causal Role of Chain-of-Thought

**Published:** September 23, 2026
**Author:** Renee Jia, Di Mu
**Source:** arXiv — cs.AI
**Language:** en-US
**HTML:** https://aiqazaqstan.com/en/articles/from-decorative-to-load-bearing-task-difficulty-shapes-the-causal-role-o

arXiv:2609.25366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is only meaningful if written reasoning causally constrains the answer. We introduce continuation-based causal testing, an ablation-patch intervention that perturbs one reasoning step, truncates…

> From the original source: **arXiv — cs.AI**
> [Read full article at arXiv — cs.AI](https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.25366)

**Tags:** #arXiv #Meta AI #DeepSeek

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