How Do Answer Tokens Read Reasoning Traces? Self-Reading Patterns in Thinking LLMs for Quantitative Reasoning

arXiv:2604.19149v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Thinking LLMs produce reasoning traces before answering. Prior activation steering work mainly targets on shaping these traces. It remains less understood how answer tokens actually read and integrate the reasoning to produce reliable outcomes. Focusing on quantitative reasoning, we analyze the answer-to-reasoning attention and observe a benign self-reading pattern aligned with correctness, characterized by a forward drift of the reading focus al