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With the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in perception tasks, enhancing their complex reasoning capabilities has emerged as a critical research focus. Existing models still suffer from challenges such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wenxin Zhu , Andong Chen , Yuchen Song , Kehai Chen , Conghui Zhu , Ziyan Chen , Tiejun Zhao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Lennart Meincke , Ethan Mollick , Lilach Mollick , Dan Shapiro

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Tianqiao Liu , Zui Chen , Zitao Liu , Mi Tian , Weiqi Luo

The performance of modern language models (LMs) has been improved by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, i.e., the process of generating intermediate results that guide the model towards a final answer. A possible explanation for this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Franz Nowak , Anej Svete , Alexandra Butoi , Ryan Cotterell

Scaling language models to larger and deeper sizes has led to significant boosts in performance. Even though the size of these models limits their application in compute-constrained environments, the race to continually develop ever larger…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Matteo Pagliardini , Martin Jaggi

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in unlocking the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although CoT prompting enhances reasoning, its verbosity imposes substantial computational overhead.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yifan Wang , Shiyu Li , Peiming Li , Xiaochen Yang , Yang Tang , Zheng Wei

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used inference-time technique for improving reasoning, yet its gains are uneven across tasks. We analyze when and why CoT helps by modeling the step-wise reasoning trajectory as a Markov chain.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zihan Wang , Yijun Dong , Qi Lei

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is widely applied to enhance the LLM capability in math, coding and reasoning tasks. However, its performance is limited for open-domain tasks, when there are no clearly defined reasoning steps or logical transitions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Qingqing Gu , Dan Wang , Yue Zhao , Xiaoyu Wang , Zhonglin Jiang , Yong Chen , Hongyan Li , Luo Ji

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zongqian Wu , Baoduo Xu , Ruochen Cui , Mengmeng Zhan , Xiaofeng Zhu , Lei Feng

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Tergel Munkhbat , Namgyu Ho , Seo Hyun Kim , Yongjin Yang , Yujin Kim , Se-Young Yun

Modern language models generate chain-of-thought traces by autoregressively sampling tokens from a finite vocabulary. While this discrete sampling has achieved remarkable success, conducting chain-of-thought with continuously-valued tokens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Halil Alperen Gozeten , M. Emrullah Ildiz , Xuechen Zhang , Hrayr Harutyunyan , Ankit Singh Rawat , Samet Oymak

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities through \emph{Chain-of-Thought} (CoT) prompting, which enables step-by-step intermediate reasoning. However, explicit CoT methods rely on discrete token-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhikang Chen , Sen Cui , Deheng Ye , Yu Zhang , Yatao Bian , Tingting Zhu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, conventional CoT often relies on unstructured, flat reasoning chains that suffer from redundancy and suboptimal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Xingshuai Huang , Derek Li , Bahareh Nikpour , Parsa Omidi

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which breaks down complex tasks into intermediate reasoning steps, has significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) on challenging tasks. However, the detailed reasoning process in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Yingqian Cui , Pengfei He , Jingying Zeng , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Zhenwei Dai , Yan Han , Chen Luo , Jing Huang , Zhen Li , Suhang Wang , Yue Xing , Jiliang Tang , Qi He

Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models' (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Soochan Lee , Gunhee Kim

Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps. Providing these steps for prompting demonstrations is called chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. CoT prompting has two major paradigms. One…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Zhuosheng Zhang , Aston Zhang , Mu Li , Alex Smola

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising performance but compromise token efficiency due to verbose reasoning processes. Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) posits that complex problems can be solved more efficiently through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ruihan Gong , Yue Liu , Wenjie Qu , Mingzhe Du , Yufei He , Yingwei Ma , Yulin Chen , Xiang Liu , Yi Wen , Xinfeng Li , Ruidong Wang , Xinzhong Zhu , Bryan Hooi , Jiaheng Zhang

Chain-of-thought and more broadly test-time compute are known to augment the expressive capabilities of language models and have led to major innovations in reasoning. Motivated by this success, this paper explores latent chain-of-thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Carson Dudley , Samet Oymak

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing implementations, such as in-context learning and fine-tuning, remain costly and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Li Li , Ziyi Wang , Yongliang Wu , Jianfei Cai , Xu Yang