Investigating the Interplay between Contextual and Parametric Chain-of-Thought Faithfulness under Optimization

ArXi:2605.24960v1 Announce Type: cross Chain-of-Thought (CoT) faithfulness, i.e., whether CoTs genuinely reflect large language models' (LLM) underlying behavior, is typically evaluated under two disjoint paradigms: contextual faithfulness, measured by perturbing the input or CoT trace, and parametric faithfulness, assessed by intervening on a model's parametric knowledge. Yet prior work compares them only descriptively. We fill this gap by proposing FaithMate, a unified preference-alignment interface for optimizing models towards either faithfulness paradigm.