# Reforming the Mechanism: Editing Reasoning Patterns in LLMs with Circuit Reshaping

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.06923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.06923/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 80 of its 92 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 80)

- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Locating and Editing Factual Associations in GPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.05262/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18223/) (2023)
- [Sinkhorn Distances: Lightspeed Computation of Optimal Transportation Distances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1306.0895/) (2013)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Mass-Editing Memory in a Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07229/) (2022)
- [Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13837/) (2025)
- [Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10403/) (2022)
- [Editing Factual Knowledge in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08164/) (2021)
- [Fast Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11309/) (2021)
- [Memory-Based Model Editing at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06520/) (2022)
- [Improve Mathematical Reasoning in Language Models by Automated Process Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06592/) (2024)
- [Towards Reasoning Era: A Survey of Long Chain-of-Thought for Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09567/) (2025)
- [From System 1 to System 2: A Survey of Reasoning Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17419/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning: Progresses and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00157/) (2024)
- [SWE-RL: Advancing LLM Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning on Open Software Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.18449/) (2025)
- [Does Localization Inform Editing? Surprising Differences in Causality-Based Localization vs. Knowledge Editing in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04213/) (2023)
- [ReFT: Reasoning with Reinforced Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08967/) (2024)
- [AlphaEdit: Null-Space Constrained Knowledge Editing for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02355/) (2024)
- [Attribution Patching Outperforms Automated Circuit Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10348/) (2023)
- [When Scaling Meets LLM Finetuning: The Effect of Data, Model and Finetuning Method](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17193/) (2024)
- [Will we run out of data? Limits of LLM scaling based on human-generated data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.04325/) (2022)
- [Knowledge Editing for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16218/) (2023)
- [ThinkPrune: Pruning Long Chain-of-Thought of LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01296/) (2025)
- [Do Large Language Models Latently Perform Multi-Hop Reasoning?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16837/) (2024)
- [Teaching Large Language Models to Reason with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04642/) (2024)
- [Rethinking the Bounds of LLM Reasoning: Are Multi-Agent Discussions the Key?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.18272/) (2024)
- [From LLM Reasoning to Autonomous AI Agents: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.19678/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Resilient and Autonomous Networks: A BlueSky Vision on AI-Native 6G](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21395/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) often exhibit flawed reasoning ability that undermines reliability. Existing approaches to improving reasoning typically treat it as a general and monolithic skill, applying broad training which is inefficient and unable to target specific reasoning errors. We introduce Reasoning Editing, a paradigm for selectively modifying specific reasoning patterns in LLMs while preserving other reasoning pathways. This task presents a fundamental trade-off between Generality, the ability of an edit to generalize across different tasks sharing the same reasoning pattern, and Locality, the ability to preserve other reasoning capabilities. Through systematic investigation, we uncover the Circuit-Interference Law: Edit interference between reasoning patterns is proportional to the overlap of their neural circuits. Guided by this principle, we propose REdit, the first framework to actively reshape neural circuits before editing, thereby modulating interference between reasoning patterns and mitigating the trade-off. REdit integrates three components: (i) Contrastive Circuit Reshaping, which directly addresses the generality-locality trade-off by disentangling overlapping circuits; (ii) Meta-Contrastive Learning, which extends transferability to novel reasoning patterns; and (iii) Dual-Level Protection, which preserves preexisting abilities by constraining reshaping update directions and regularizing task-level predictions. Extensive experiments with Qwen-2.5-3B on propositional logic reasoning tasks across three difficulty levels demonstrate that REdit consistently achieves superior generality and locality compared to baselines, with additional validation in mathematics showing broader potential. Our code is available at https://github.com/LzyFischer/REdit.