Hang Dong
Other people with similar names: Hang Dong
Unverified author pages with similar names: Hang Dong
2026
LLM Reasoning as Trajectories: Step-Specific Representation Geometry and Correctness Signals
Lihao Sun | Hang Dong | Bo Qiao | Qingwei Lin | Dongmei Zhang | Saravan Rajmohan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Lihao Sun | Hang Dong | Bo Qiao | Qingwei Lin | Dongmei Zhang | Saravan Rajmohan
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
This work characterizes large language models’ chain-of-thought generation as a structured trajectory through representation space. We show that mathematical reasoning traverses functionally ordered, step-specific subspaces that become increasingly separable with layer depth. This structure already exists in base models, while reasoning training primarily accelerates convergence toward termination-related subspaces rather than introducing new representational organization. While early reasoning steps follow similar trajectories, correct and incorrect solutions diverge systematically at late stages. This late-stage divergence enables mid-reasoning prediction of final-answer correctness with ROC–AUC up to 0.87. Furthermore, we introduce trajectory-based steering, an inference-time intervention framework that enables reasoning correction and length control based on derived ideal trajectories. Together, these results establish reasoning trajectories as a geometric lens for interpreting, predicting, and controlling LLM reasoning behavior.