SliceGraph: Mapping Process Isomers in Multi-Run Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

TL;DR

SliceGraph offers a novel way to analyze multi-run chain-of-thought reasoning by mapping shared and divergent reasoning paths, revealing complex process geometries often hidden in final-answer aggregation.

Contribution

It introduces SliceGraph, a graph-based method to characterize and analyze the structure of reasoning trajectories in multi-run chain-of-thought models, highlighting process isomers.

Findings

85.5% of correct trajectories split into multiple process families.

76.6% of run pairs with same answer are cross-family.

Route families navigate distinct transition kernels.

Abstract

Multi-run chain-of-thought reasoning is usually collapsed to final-answer aggregates, which discard howsampled trajectories share, split, and rejoin through intermediate computation. We propose SliceGraph, a post-hoc problem-model-cell graph built by mutual-kNN over sparse activation-key Jaccard similarity between CoT slices, and treat it as a measurement object for process geometry rather than as a decoding program. Across sampled CoT ensembles from three primary 4B/8B models on math and science benchmarks, blinded annotation supports SliceGraph biconnected components as shared reasoning-state units and process families as within-family strategy-coherent route units. In 85.5% of 954 problem-model cells, correct CoTs sharing the same normalized answer split into multiple process families; among cells with at least two such runs, 76.6% of run pairs are cross-family on average. We call such same-answer, family-divergent correct trajectories process isomers. A label-seeded reward field provides a separate value-landscape layer: success-associated regions often split into disconnected high-value cores, and route families specialize over these core footprints rather than merely duplicating one another. A typed-state transition analysis further shows that process families navigate the same atlas with distinct transition kernels under matched null controls. Representation ablations, a cross-architecture replication, and two cross-scale replications support the robustness of the route-family scaffold, showing that final-answer aggregation overlooks this structured multi-route process geometry.