[2510.07761] Test-Time Reasoners Are Strategic Multiple-Choice Test-Takers
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Computer Science > Computation and Language
arXiv:2510.07761 (cs)
[Submitted on 9 Oct 2025 (v1), last revised 20 Apr 2026 (this version, v2)]
Title:Test-Time Reasoners Are Strategic Multiple-Choice Test-Takers
Authors:Nishant Balepur, Atrey Desai, Rachel Rudinger<br>View a PDF of the paper titled Test-Time Reasoners Are Strategic Multiple-Choice Test-Takers, by Nishant Balepur and 2 other authors
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Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) now give reasoning before answering, excelling in tasks like multiple-choice question answering (MCQA). Yet, a concern is that LLMs do not solve MCQs as intended, as work finds LLMs sans reasoning succeed in MCQA without using the question, i.e., choices-only. Such partial-input success is often linked to trivial shortcuts, but reasoning traces could reveal if choices-only strategies are truly shallow. To examine these strategies, we have reasoning LLMs solve MCQs in full and choices-only inputs; test-time reasoning often boosts accuracy in full and in choices-only, half the time. While possibly due to shallow shortcuts, choices-only success is barely affected by the length of reasoning traces, and after finding traces pass faithfulness tests, we show they use less problematic strategies like inferring missing questions. In all, we challenge claims that partial-input success is always a flaw, so we propose how reasoning traces could separate problematic data from less problematic reasoning.
Comments:<br>ACL 2026
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
Cite as:<br>arXiv:2510.07761 [cs.CL]
(or<br>arXiv:2510.07761v2 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2510.07761
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arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
Submission history<br>From: Nishant Balepur [view email]<br>[v1]<br>Thu, 9 Oct 2025 04:00:09 UTC (298 KB)
[v2]<br>Mon, 20 Apr 2026 16:38:40 UTC (293 KB)
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