Order-Invariant Answers, Order-Sensitive Representations in Mathematical Reasoning

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.28442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reordering a set of mathematical rules without changing its meaning should preserve the correct answer, but must a model's internal representations stay invariant too? We investigate this question using synthetic multi-step function-composition problems, each presented under multiple rule orderings with the same correct answer. We measure accuracy and permutation signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), which quantifies how distinctly ordering patterns are r