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Compute scaling for language model (LM) pretraining has outpaced the growth of human-written texts, leading to concerns that data will become the bottleneck to LM scaling. To continue scaling pretraining in this data-constrained regime, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Yangjun Ruan , Neil Band , Chris J. Maddison , Tatsunori Hashimoto

This work characterizes large language models' chain-of-thought generation as a structured trajectory through representation space. We show that mathematical reasoning traverses functionally ordered, step-specific subspaces that become…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Lihao Sun , Hang Dong , Bo Qiao , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan

Large language models (LLMs) can perform reasoning computations both internally within their latent space and externally by generating explicit token sequences like chains of thought. Significant progress in enhancing reasoning abilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Thilo Hagendorff , Sarah Fabi

Latent reasoning has been recently proposed as a reasoning paradigm and performs multi-step reasoning through generating steps in the latent space instead of the textual space. This paradigm enables reasoning beyond discrete language tokens…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Yingqian Cui , Zhenwei Dai , Bing He , Zhan Shi , Hui Liu , Rui Sun , Zhiji Liu , Yue Xing , Jiliang Tang , Benoit Dumoulin

Large language models have been shown to struggle with multi-step reasoning, and do not retain previous reasoning steps for future use. We propose a simple method for solving both of these problems by allowing the model to take Self-Notes.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-01 Jack Lanchantin , Shubham Toshniwal , Jason Weston , Arthur Szlam , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar

Complex reasoning over text requires understanding and chaining together free-form predicates and logical connectives. Prior work has largely tried to do this either symbolically or with black-box transformers. We present a middle ground…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-08 Jiangming Liu , Matt Gardner , Shay B. Cohen , Mirella Lapata

We study a novel language model architecture that is capable of scaling test-time computation by implicitly reasoning in latent space. Our model works by iterating a recurrent block, thereby unrolling to arbitrary depth at test-time. This…

Reasoning models improve their problem-solving ability through inference-time scaling, allocating more compute via longer token budgets. Identifying which reasoning traces are likely to succeed remains a key opportunity: reliably predicting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Martina G. Vilas , Safoora Yousefi , Besmira Nushi , Eric Horvitz , Vidhisha Balachandran

The real-world information sources are inherently multilingual, which naturally raises a question about whether language models can synthesize information across languages. In this paper, we introduce a simple two-hop question answering…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Yan Meng , Wafaa Mohammed , Christof Monz

Reasoning is a core capability of large language models, yet how multi-step reasoning is learned and executed remains unclear. We study this question in a controlled cellular-automata (1dCA) framework that excludes memorisation by using…

Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage step-by-step reasoning to solve complex problems. Standard evaluation practice involves generating a complete reasoning trace and assessing the correctness of the final answer presented at its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Hasan Abed Al Kader Hammoud , Hani Itani , Bernard Ghanem

Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Michael Rizvi-Martel , Guillaume Rabusseau , Marius Mosbach

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Bohan Liu , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang

The relationship between language and thought remains an unresolved philosophical issue. Existing viewpoints can be broadly categorized into two schools: one asserting their independence, and another arguing that language constrains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Kaiyuan Zheng , Qinghua Zhao , Lei Li

Mathematical reasoning is regarded as a necessary ability for Language Models (LMs). Recent works demonstrate large LMs' impressive performance in solving math problems. The success is attributed to their Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Tianduo Wang , Wei Lu

Large language models have recently shown promising progress in mathematical reasoning when fine-tuned with human-generated sequences walking through a sequence of solution steps. However, the solution sequences are not formally structured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Andrew J. Nam , Mengye Ren , Chelsea Finn , James L. McClelland

Reasoning, as an essential ability for complex problem-solving, can provide back-end support for various real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, negotiation, etc. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Shuofei Qiao , Yixin Ou , Ningyu Zhang , Xiang Chen , Yunzhi Yao , Shumin Deng , Chuanqi Tan , Fei Huang , Huajun Chen

Reasoning large language models achieve impressive test-time scaling by thinking for longer, but this performance gain comes at significant compute cost. Directly limiting test-time budget hurts overall performance, but not all problems are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Menghua Wu , Cai Zhou , Stephen Bates , Tommi Jaakkola

While existing evaluations of large language models (LLMs) measure deception rates, the underlying conditions that give rise to deceptive behavior are poorly understood. We investigate this question using a novel dataset of realistic moral…

The black-box nature of neural models has motivated a line of research that aims to generate natural language rationales to explain why a model made certain predictions. Such rationale generation models, to date, have been trained on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Faeze Brahman , Vered Shwartz , Rachel Rudinger , Yejin Choi