Measuring and Mitigating Post-hoc Rationalization in Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation

arXiv:2602.14469v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reverse Chain-of-Thought Generation (RCG) synthesizes reasoning traces from query-answer pairs, but it risks producing post-hoc rationalizations: when models can see the answer during generation, a systematic train-inference mismatch arises, because the visible answer shapes reasoning trajectories in ways that students cannot replicate without answer access during inference. We formalize this mismatch through a three-level measurement hierarchy: lexical, trajectory, and probabilistic anchoring, which capture surface token overlap, per-token generation dependence on the answer, and total information transmission from trace to answer, respectively. We analyze semantic suppression, the intuitive mitigation strategy that instructs models to ignore the answer, and find that it is counterproductive: while it reduces lexical overlap, it paradoxically increases trajectory anchoring--the per-token dependence of the generation process on the forbidden answer--consistent with ironic monitoring. We attribute this failure to active monitoring of the forbidden answer, which inadvertently deepens process-level dependence on it. To break this cycle, we propose Structural Skeleton-guided Reasoning (SSR), whose core contribution is to replace answer suppression with structural decoupling: SSR first generates a response-abstracted functional skeleton designed to limit direct answer encoding and then uses it as a structural target for full trace generation. Experiments across open-ended reasoning benchmarks show that SSR consistently mitigates anchoring, and that Distilled SSR (SSR-D), a distillation variant that internalizes skeleton-guided reasoning from teacher-generated traces, achieves up to 10\% improvement over suppression baselines while mitigating out-of-distribution (OOD) degradation.