English
Related papers

Related papers: From Explicit CoT to Implicit CoT: Learning to Int…

200 papers

Chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) has the potential to improve the explainability of language model reasoning. But CoT can also systematically misrepresent the factors influencing models' behavior -- for example, rationalizing answers in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 James Chua , Edward Rees , Hunar Batra , Samuel R. Bowman , Julian Michael , Ethan Perez , Miles Turpin

Few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While theoretical investigations have been conducted to understand CoT, the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Yingqian Cui , Pengfei He , Xianfeng Tang , Qi He , Chen Luo , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

Prompting methods for language models, such as Chain-of-thought (CoT), present intuitive step-by-step processes for problem solving. These methodologies aim to equip models with a better understanding of the correct procedures for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Jason Li , Lauren Yraola , Kevin Zhu , Sean O'Brien

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

Distilling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning from large language models into compact student models presents a fundamental challenge: teacher rationales are often too verbose for smaller models to faithfully reproduce. Existing approaches…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Bowen Yu , Maolin Wang , Sheng Zhang , Binhao Wang , Yi Wen , Jingtong Gao , Bowen Liu , Zimo Zhao , Wanyu Wang , Xiangyu Zhao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is known to improve Large Language Models both empirically and in terms of theoretical approximation power. However, our understanding of the inner workings and conditions of apparition of CoT capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Vivien Cabannes , Charles Arnal , Wassim Bouaziz , Alice Yang , Francois Charton , Julia Kempe

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, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (aka. GPT-3), have been developed to understand language through the analysis of extensive text data, allowing them to identify patterns and connections between words.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Baphumelele Masikisiki , Vukosi Marivate , Yvette Hlope

Whether intermediate reasoning is computationally useful or merely explanatory depends on whether chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contain task-relevant information. We present a mechanistic causal analysis of CoT on GSM8K using activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Houman Mehrafarin , Amit Parekh , Ioannis Konstas

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables large language models to solve complex reasoning problems by generating intermediate steps. However, confined by its inherent single-pass and sequential generation process, CoT heavily relies on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Jingyuan Qi , Zhiyang Xu , Ying Shen , Minqian Liu , Di Jin , Qifan Wang , Lifu Huang

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

Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has delivered success on complex reasoning tasks, which aims at designing a simple prompt like ``Let's think step by step'' or multiple in-context exemplars with well-designed rationales to elicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jianing Wang , Qiushi Sun , Xiang Li , Ming Gao

Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent-CoT) aims to enable step-by-step computation without emitting long rationales, yet its mechanisms remain unclear. We study CODI, a continuous-thought teacher-student distillation model, on strictly sequential…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jia Liang , Liangming Pan

In reasoning tasks, even a minor error can cascade into inaccurate results, leading to suboptimal performance of large language models in such domains. Earlier fine-tuning approaches sought to mitigate this by leveraging more precise…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-12 Changyu Chen , Xiting Wang , Ting-En Lin , Ang Lv , Yuchuan Wu , Xin Gao , Ji-Rong Wen , Rui Yan , Yongbin Li

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought substantial attention to the Chain of Thought (CoT) approach, primarily due to its ability to enhance the capability of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. Moreover, the significance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Bingshuai Liu , Chenyang Lyu , Zijun Min , Zhanyu Wang , Jinsong Su , Longyue Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become central to mathematical reasoning in large language models, yet models remain brittle to early errors: a single arithmetic slip or unjustified inference typically propagates uncorrected to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Saraswathy Amjith , Mihika Dusad , Neha Muramalla , Shweta Shah

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Vinay Sharma , Manish Jain

Chain-of-thought (COT) prompting can help large language models (LLMs) reason toward correct answers, but its efficacy in reasoning toward incorrect answers is unexplored. This process of elimination (PoE), when used with COT, can enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Nishant Balepur , Shramay Palta , Rachel Rudinger

Mathematical reasoning has been challenging for large language models (LLMs), and the introduction of step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) inference has significantly advanced the mathematical capabilities of LLMs. However, current…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Lang Cao , Yingtian Zou , Chao Peng , Renhong Chen , Wu Ning , Yitong Li

In enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), prior research primarily focuses on specific prompting techniques such as few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. These methods, while effective, often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Xuezhi Wang , Denny Zhou