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While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it requires models to verbalize every intermediate step in text tokens, constraining the model thoughts to the discrete vocabulary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Weihao Liu , Dehai Min , Lu Cheng

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning not only enhances large language model performance but also provides critical insights into decision-making processes, marking it as a useful tool for monitoring model intent and planning. However, recent…

Pause tokens, simple filler symbols such as "...", consistently improve Transformer performance on both language and mathematical tasks, yet their theoretical effect remains unexplained. We provide the first formal separation result,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Charles London , Varun Kanade

The use of continuous instead of discrete tokens during the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) phase of reasoning LLMs has garnered attention recently, based on the intuition that a continuous mixture of discrete tokens could simulate a superposition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Natasha Butt , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Ismail Labiad , Julia Kempe , Yann Ollivier

Large language models (LLMs) have shown an impressive ability to perform tasks believed to require thought processes. When the model does not document an explicit thought process, it becomes difficult to understand the processes occurring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Yuval Shalev , Amir Feder , Ariel Goldstein

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is an efficient prompting method that enables the reasoning ability of large language models by augmenting the query using multiple examples with multiple intermediate steps. Despite the empirical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Hongkang Li , Songtao Lu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xiaodong Cui , Meng Wang

Given that rich information is hidden behind ubiquitous numbers in text, numerical reasoning over text should be an essential skill of AI systems. To derive precise equations to solve numerical reasoning problems, previous work focused on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-30 Zhihong Shao , Fei Huang , Minlie Huang

Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on generating explicit tokens step by step, and their effectiveness typically hinges on large-scale supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haoyu Zheng , Zhuonan Wang , Yuqian Yuan , Tianwei Lin , Wenqiao Zhang , Zheqi Lv , Juncheng Li , Siliang Tang , Yueting Zhuang , Hongyang He

Recent large language models support inputs of up to 10 million tokens, yet they perform poorly on long-context tasks that require complex reasoning. Such tasks can be solved using only a subset of the input -- a proxy context -- rather…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Miao Li , Irina Saparina , Alexander Gurung , Mirella Lapata

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, current approaches employ uniform language density for both intermediate reasoning and final answers, leading to computational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-18 Zhengyi Zhao , Shubo Zhang , Yuxi Zhang , Huimin Wang , Binyang Li , Kam-Fai Wong

Many natural language processing tasks benefit from long inputs, but processing long documents with Transformers is expensive -- not only due to quadratic attention complexity but also from applying feedforward and projection layers to…

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the performance of large language models (LLMs) across a wide range of tasks, and prior research shows that CoT can theoretically increase expressiveness. However, there is limited mechanistic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Yifan Zhang , Wenyu Du , Dongming Jin , Jie Fu , Zhi Jin

It has been shown that the chain of thought (CoT) can enhance the power of large language models (LLMs) to solve certain mathematical reasoning problems. However, the capacity of CoT is still not fully explored. As an important instance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Lijia Yu , Xiao-Shan Gao , Lijun Zhang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled transformer-based language models to excel at complex mathematics and multi-step planning. However, in standard decoder-only architectures, these reasoning steps are externalized in natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Wenquan Lu , Yuechuan Yang , Kyle Lee , Yanshu Li , Enqi Liu

Recent advances in natural language processing highlight two key factors for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs): (i) allocating more test-time compute tends to help on harder problems but often introduces redundancy in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Riccardo Alberghi , Elizaveta Demyanenko , Luca Biggio , Luca Saglietti

Tokenization is a necessary component within the current architecture of many language mod-els, including the transformer-based large language models (LLMs) of Generative AI, yet its impact on the model's cognition is often overlooked. We…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). CoT explicitly encourages the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem, by providing a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Boshi Wang , Sewon Min , Xiang Deng , Jiaming Shen , You Wu , Luke Zettlemoyer , Huan Sun

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yang , Ke Lin , Xing Yu

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