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Reasoning language models improve performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs), but this process can also increase harmful outputs in adversarial settings. In this work, we ask whether the long CoTs can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Yik Siu Chan , Zheng-Xin Yong , Stephen H. Bach

Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to provide step-by-step rationales, improving performance on complex tasks. Despite its benefits, vanilla CoT often fails to fully verify intermediate inferences and can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Manish Sanwal

This report examines the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in improving the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by previous studies \cite{Min2022RethinkingWork}, we analyze the impact of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Aayush Mishra , Karan Thakkar

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Xiaomin Li , Zhou Yu , Zhiwei Zhang , Xupeng Chen , Ziji Zhang , Yingying Zhuang , Narayanan Sadagopan , Anurag Beniwal

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

Early research into data poisoning attacks against Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrated the ease with which backdoors could be injected. More recent LLMs add step-by-step reasoning, expanding the attack surface to include the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-09 Hanna Foerster , Ilia Shumailov , Yiren Zhao , Harsh Chaudhari , Jamie Hayes , Robert Mullins , Yarin Gal

Long chains of thought (CoT) from current language models frequently contain logical gaps and unjustified leaps, limiting the gains from additional test-time compute. Improving reasoning quality directly would require process reward models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingchu Gai , Guanning Zeng , Christina Baek , Chen Wu , J. Zico Kolter , Andrej Risteski , Aditi Raghunathan

The chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm uses the elicitation of step-by-step rationales as a proxy for reasoning, gradually refining the model's latent representation of a solution. However, it remains unclear just how early a Large Language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Joey David

Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but have also introduced their computational efficiency as a new attack surface. In this paper, we…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Shuaitong Liu , Renjue Li , Lijia Yu , Lijun Zhang , Zhiming Liu , Gaojie Jin

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) Prompting is a dominant paradigm in Large Language Models (LLMs) to enhance complex reasoning. It guides LLMs to present multi-step reasoning, rather than generating the final answer directly. However, CoT encounters…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Dong-Hai Zhu , Yu-Jie Xiong , Jia-Chen Zhang , Xi-Jiong Xie , Chun-Ming Xia

Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on complex tasks, largely due to the adoption of Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) reasoning. However, they often exhibit overthinking -- performing unnecessary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Keqin Peng , Liang Ding , Yuanxin Ouyang , Meng Fang , Dacheng Tao

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to benefit from chain-of-thought (COT) prompting, particularly when tackling tasks that require systematic reasoning processes. On the other hand, COT prompting also poses new vulnerabilities in the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Zhen Xiang , Fengqing Jiang , Zidi Xiong , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran , Bo Li

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (LLMs) explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps prior to generating final answers, helping the model excel in complex problem-solving. In this paper, we demonstrate that this emerging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Tong Wu , Chong Xiang , Jiachen T. Wang , G. Edward Suh , Prateek Mittal

In-Context Learning (ICL) in Large Language Models (LLM) has emerged as the dominant technique for performing natural language tasks, as it does not require updating the model parameters with gradient-based methods. ICL promises to "adapt"…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-05 Georgios Chochlakis , Niyantha Maruthu Pandiyan , Kristina Lerman , Shrikanth Narayanan

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicited via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) practices. However, whether fundamental reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Xingwei Tan , Marco Valentino , Mahmud Elahi Akhter , Yuxiang Zhou , Maria Liakata , Nikolaos Aletras

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate their promise in tackling complicated practical challenges by combining action-based policies with chain of thought (CoT) reasoning. Having high-quality prompts on hand, however, is vital to the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-03-01 Xue Yan , Yan Song , Xinyu Cui , Filippos Christianos , Haifeng Zhang , David Henry Mguni , Jun Wang

Test-time scaling has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning, yet the limitations of current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation obscures whether performance gains stem from genuine reasoning or mere verbosity. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhizhang Fu , Yuancheng Gu , Chenkai Hu , Hanmeng Liu , Yue Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored. We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yanjie He

Recent advances in test-time scaling have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to display sophisticated reasoning abilities via extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation. Despite their potential, these Reasoning LLMs (RLMs) often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Zhen Xiong , Yujun Cai , Zhecheng Li , Yiwei Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across diverse tasks, exhibiting emergent properties such as semantic prompt comprehension, In-Context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Despite their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yuling Jiao , Yanming Lai , Huazhen Lin , Wensen Ma , Houduo Qi , Defeng Sun