SWEET: Mitigating Spurious Feature Reliance in LLM Reasoning via Weight Editing

arXiv:2611.10974v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning in large language models can be disrupted by simple input perturbations (e.g. adding irrelevant distractors), suggesting reliance on spurious correlations. Identifying and suppressing the spurious features involved in long chain-of-thought reasoning remains challenging. We introduce Spurious-feature WEight EdiTing (SWEET), a training-free method that combines counterfactual interventions with mechanistic interpretability to identify and suppress spurious-features. SWEET extracts token- and sequence-level behavioral directions from activation contrasts between original problems and their counterfactual variants - capturing local and global patterns of spurious reasoning. It then localizes the responsible MLP neurons and attention heads and suppresses their contributions along these directions through weight edits. Using only 20 original-counterfactual pairs for direction extraction, SWEET improves accuracy by an average of 11.8 percentage points on perturbed inputs and 2 points on original inputs across five open-weight reasoning models and five reasoning benchmarks. It also reduces the relative gap between original and perturbed accuracies from 17.6% to 2.5%. Analyses identify two recurring forms of spurious reasoning, i.e. over-integrating irrelevant conditions and overthinking, and provide mechanistic evidence that SWEET improves reasoning robustness by suppressing both behavioral directions.