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Large language models (LLMs) have recently attracted considerable interest for their ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, such as chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, most of the existing approaches to enhance this ability rely…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Xinyi Wang , Lucas Caccia , Oleksiy Ostapenko , Xingdi Yuan , William Yang Wang , Alessandro Sordoni

When a language model generates text, the selection of individual tokens might lead it down very different reasoning paths, making uncertainty difficult to quantify. In this work, we consider whether reasoning language models represent the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Amir Zur , Atticus Geiger , Ekdeep Singh Lubana , Eric Bigelow

Recent theoretical work has identified surprisingly simple reasoning problems, such as checking if two nodes in a graph are connected or simulating finite-state machines, that are provably unsolvable by standard transformers that answer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal

Language models generate responses by producing a series of tokens in immediate succession: the $(K+1)^{th}$ token is an outcome of manipulating $K$ hidden vectors per layer, one vector per preceding token. What if instead we were to let…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-23 Sachin Goyal , Ziwei Ji , Ankit Singh Rawat , Aditya Krishna Menon , Sanjiv Kumar , Vaishnavh Nagarajan

Chain-of-thought (CoT) via prompting is the de facto method for eliciting reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). But for what kinds of tasks is this extra ``thinking'' really helpful? To analyze this, we conducted a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Zayne Sprague , Fangcong Yin , Juan Diego Rodriguez , Dongwei Jiang , Manya Wadhwa , Prasann Singhal , Xinyu Zhao , Xi Ye , Kyle Mahowald , Greg Durrett

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language models (LLMs) on difficult tasks, but it also makes inference expensive because every intermediate step must be generated as a discrete token. Latent reasoning reduces visible token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xuan Li , Yining Wang , Yuchen Liu , Guanjun Liu , Delai Qiu , Shengping Liu , Jiaen Liang , Wei Huang , Jun Yu , Junnan Zhu

Chain-of-thought prompting has emerged as a powerful technique for enabling large language models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks. However, these reasoning chains can be verbose, raising concerns about efficiency. In response,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Ayeong Lee , Ethan Che , Tianyi Peng

Large Language Models achieve next-token prediction by transporting a vectorized piece of text (prompt) across an accompanying embedding space under the action of successive transformer layers. The resulting high-dimensional trajectories…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Raphaël Sarfati , Toni J. B. Liu , Nicolas Boullé , Christopher J. Earls

Humans can approach complex visual problems by mentally simulating intermediate visual steps, rather than reasoning through language alone. Inspired by this, several works on Vision-Language Models have recently explored chain-of-thought…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-20 André G. Viveiros , Nuno Gonçalves , André F. T. Martins , Matthias Lindemann

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a critical technique in enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), and latent reasoning methods have been proposed to accelerate the inefficient token-level reasoning chain. We notice that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Fangwei Zhu , Zhifang Sui

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reduces the inference cost of large language models by internalizing the explicit rationales. However, existing approaches typically lack alignment with explicit rationales and adaptivity to example…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yukyung Lee , Yumeng Shen , Jinhyeong Park , Hyein Yang , Jun-Hyung Park

Test-time compute is emerging as a new paradigm for enhancing language models' complex multi-step reasoning capabilities, as demonstrated by the success of OpenAI's o1 and o3, as well as DeepSeek's R1. Compared to explicit reasoning in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Tianhe Lin , Jian Xie , Siyu Yuan , Deqing Yang

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

Chain of thought is a natural inference-time method for increasing the computational power of transformer-based large language models (LLMs), but comes at the cost of sequential decoding. Are there more efficient alternatives to expand a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs), the excessive length of reasoning tokens increases latency and KV cache memory usage, and may even truncate final answers under context limits. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Gengyang Li , Yifeng Gao , Yuming Li , Yunfang Wu

It has been well-known that Chain-of-Thought can remarkably enhance LLMs' performance on complex tasks. However, because it also introduces slower inference speeds and higher computational costs, many researches have attempted to use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Yijiong Yu

Transformer-based models can perform complicated reasoning by generating reasoning paths token by token. While effective, this approach often requires generating thousands of tokens to solve a single problem, which can be slow and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jiayu Liu , Zhenya Huang , Xuan Yang , Tianyun Ji , Anya Sims , Hao Xu , Enhong Chen , Yee Whye Teh , Ning Miao

The Transformer architecture excels in a variety of language modeling tasks, outperforming traditional neural architectures such as RNN and LSTM. This is partially due to its elimination of recurrent connections, which allows for parallel…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Xiang Zhang , Muhammad Abdul-Mageed , Laks V. S. Lakshmanan

Tokenization is the first - and often underappreciated - layer of computation in language models. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables transformer models to approximate recurrent computation by externalizing intermediate steps, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Jiaqi Wei , Yiwei Xu , Chenyu You

Chain-of-Thought prompting has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of large language models, with numerous studies exploring factors influencing its performance. However, the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Hao Yang , Qianghua Zhao , Lei Li