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Related papers: Why think step by step? Reasoning emerges from the…

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Do language models make decisions under uncertainty like humans do, and what role does chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning play in the underlying decision process? We introduce an active probabilistic reasoning task that cleanly separates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Gonçalo Guiomar , Elia Torre , Pehuen Moure , Victoria Shavina , Mario Giulianelli , Shih-Chii Liu , Valerio Mante

Trained on vast corpora of human language, language models demonstrate emergent human-like reasoning abilities. Yet they are still far from true intelligence, which opens up intriguing opportunities to explore the parallels of humans and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-05 Tengxiao Liu , Qipeng Guo , Xiangkun Hu , Cheng Jiayang , Yue Zhang , Xipeng Qiu , Zheng Zhang

To augment language models with the ability to reason, researchers usually prompt or finetune them to produce chain of thought reasoning steps before producing the final answer. However, although people use natural language to reason…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Yuntian Deng , Kiran Prasad , Roland Fernandez , Paul Smolensky , Vishrav Chaudhary , Stuart Shieber

Multi-step reasoning instruction, such as chain-of-thought prompting, is widely adopted to explore better language models (LMs) performance. We report on the systematic strategy that LMs employ in such a multi-step reasoning process. Our…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Yoichi Aoki , Keito Kudo , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Shusaku Sone , Masaya Taniguchi , Keisuke Sakaguchi , Kentaro Inui

We consider the question: when a large language reasoning model makes a choice, did it think first and then decide to, or decide first and then think? In this paper, we present evidence that detectable, early-encoded decisions shape…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Esakkivel Esakkiraja , Sai Rajeswar , Denis Akhiyarov , Rajagopal Venkatesaramani

We present the surprising finding that a language model's reasoning capabilities can be improved by training on synthetic datasets of chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from more capable models, even when all of those traces lead to an incorrect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Abhranil Chandra , Ayush Agrawal , Arian Hosseini , Sebastian Fischmeister , Rishabh Agarwal , Navin Goyal , Aaron Courville

We explore how generating a chain of thought -- a series of intermediate reasoning steps -- significantly improves the ability of large language models to perform complex reasoning. In particular, we show how such reasoning abilities emerge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-12 Jason Wei , Xuezhi Wang , Dale Schuurmans , Maarten Bosma , Brian Ichter , Fei Xia , Ed Chi , Quoc Le , Denny Zhou

A new generation of AI models generates step-by-step reasoning text before producing an answer. This text appears to offer a human-readable window into their computation process, and is increasingly relied upon for transparency and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Mosh Levy , Zohar Elyoseph , Yoav Goldberg

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yufeng Zhang , Xuepeng Wang , Lingxiang Wu , Jinqiao Wang

Multi-step reasoning ability is fundamental to many natural language tasks, yet it is unclear what constitutes a good reasoning chain and how to evaluate them. Most existing methods focus solely on whether the reasoning chain leads to the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Archiki Prasad , Swarnadeep Saha , Xiang Zhou , Mohit Bansal

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are able to perform complex reasoning without explicit fine-tuning. To understand how pre-training with a next-token prediction objective contributes to the emergence of such reasoning capability, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Xinyi Wang , Alfonso Amayuelas , Kexun Zhang , Liangming Pan , Wenhu Chen , William Yang Wang

Large language models excel on static benchmarks, but their ability as self-learning agents in dynamic environments remains unclear. We evaluate three prompting strategies: self-reflection, heuristic mutation, and planning across dynamic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Annie Wong , Thomas Bäck , Aske Plaat , Niki van Stein , Anna V. Kononova

Large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters exhibit in-context learning abilities, enabling few-shot learning on tasks that the model was not specifically trained for. Traditional models achieve breakthrough performance on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Aske Plaat , Annie Wong , Suzan Verberne , Joost Broekens , Niki van Stein , Thomas Back

Chain of thought reasoning has demonstrated remarkable success in large language models, yet its adaptation to vision-language reasoning remains an open challenge with unclear best practices. Existing attempts typically employ reasoning…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Honghao Chen , Xingzhou Lou , Xiaokun Feng , Kaiqi Huang , Xinlong Wang

Reasoning models enhance performance by tackling problems in a step-by-step manner, decomposing them into sub-problems and exploring long chains of thought before producing an answer. However, applying extended reasoning to every step…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Haiquan Lu , Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Qi Li , Xinchao Wang

We analyze reasoning in language models during task-specific fine-tuning and draws parallel between reasoning tokens--intermediate steps generated while solving problem and the human working memory. Drawing from cognitive science, we align…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Mukul Singh , Ananya Singha , Arjun Radhakrishna , Sumit Gulwani

Generating step-by-step "chain-of-thought" rationales improves language model performance on complex reasoning tasks like mathematics or commonsense question-answering. However, inducing language model rationale generation currently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-23 Eric Zelikman , Yuhuai Wu , Jesse Mu , Noah D. Goodman

Neural reasoning accuracy improves when generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, the source of this improvement is yet unclear. Here, we investigate and factorize the benefit of generating intermediate steps for symbolic reasoning.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-02-17 Yoichi Aoki , Keito Kudo , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Ana Brassard , Masashi Yoshikawa , Keisuke Sakaguchi , Kentaro Inui

Large Language Models have achieved remarkable performance on reasoning tasks, motivating research into how this ability evolves during training. Prior work has primarily analyzed this evolution via explicit generation outcomes, treating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Siyuan Zhang , Jialian Li , Yichi Zhang , Xiao Yang , Yinpeng Dong , Hang Su

Although contemporary large language models (LMs) demonstrate impressive question-answering capabilities, their answers are typically the product of a single call to the model. This entails an unwelcome degree of opacity and compromises…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Antonia Creswell , Murray Shanahan
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