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Related papers: Lines of Thought in Large Language Models

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Large language models have recently shown promising progress in mathematical reasoning when fine-tuned with human-generated sequences walking through a sequence of solution steps. However, the solution sequences are not formally structured…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-07 Andrew J. Nam , Mengye Ren , Chelsea Finn , James L. McClelland

Understanding the inner workings of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical research frontier. Prior research has shown that a single LLM's concept representations can be captured as steering vectors (SVs), enabling the control of LLM…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Youcheng Huang , Chen Huang , Duanyu Feng , Wenqiang Lei , Jiancheng Lv

Current frontier large-language models rely on reasoning to achieve state-of-the-art performance. Many existing interpretability are limited in this area, as standard methods have been designed to study single forward passes of a model…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Paul C. Bogdan , Uzay Macar , Neel Nanda , Arthur Conmy

Reasoning-trained language models often spend more tokens on harder problems, but longer chains of thought do not show whether a model is merely computing for more steps or following a different internal trajectory. We study this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Anders Gjølbye , Lars Kai Hansen , Sanmi Koyejo

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-scale language models (LMs) pretrained on massive corpora of text, such as GPT-2, are powerful open-domain text generators. However, as our systematic examination reveals, it is still challenging for such models to generate coherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Bowen Tan , Zichao Yang , Maruan AI-Shedivat , Eric P. Xing , Zhiting Hu

Modern large language models (LLMs) excel at tasks that require storing and retrieving knowledge, such as factual recall and question answering. Transformers are central to this capability because they can encode information during training…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-18 Nuri Mert Vural , Alberto Bietti , Mahdi Soltanolkotabi , Denny Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs), powered by Transformers, have demonstrated human-like intelligence capabilities, yet their underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. This paper presents a novel framework for interpreting LLMs as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Phill Kyu Rhee

Narrative understanding involves capturing the author's cognitive processes, providing insights into their knowledge, intentions, beliefs, and desires. Although large language models (LLMs) excel in generating grammatically coherent text,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-19 Lixing Zhu , Runcong Zhao , Lin Gui , Yulan He

Large language models (LLMs), when guided by explicit textual plans, can perform reliable step-by-step reasoning during problem-solving. However, generating accurate and effective textual plans remains challenging due to LLM hallucinations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Sijia Chen , Di Niu

Decoder-only language models have the ability to dynamically switch between various computational tasks based on input prompts. Despite many successful applications of prompting, there is very limited understanding of the internal mechanism…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Artem Kirsanov , Chi-Ning Chou , Kyunghyun Cho , SueYeon Chung

Some consider large-scale language models that can generate long and coherent pieces of text as dangerous, since they may be used in misinformation campaigns. Here we formulate large-scale language model output detection as a hypothesis…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-02-11 Lav R. Varshney , Nitish Shirish Keskar , Richard Socher

In this paper, I present a novel method to detect intellectual influence across a large corpus. Taking advantage of the unique affordances of large language models in encoding semantic and structural meaning while remaining robust to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Lucian Li

Humans have a powerful and mysterious capacity to reason. Working through a set of mental steps enables us to make inferences we would not be capable of making directly even though we get no additional data from the world. Similarly, when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Ben Prystawski , Michael Y. Li , Noah D. Goodman

We study how large language models (LLMs) ``think'' through their representation space. We propose a novel geometric framework that models an LLM's reasoning as flows -- embedding trajectories evolving where logic goes. We disentangle…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Yufa Zhou , Yixiao Wang , Xunjian Yin , Shuyan Zhou , Anru R. Zhang

In English and other languages, multiple adjectives in noun phrases follow intricate ordering patterns. These patterns have been widely studied in linguistics and provide a useful test case for assessing how language models (LMs) acquire…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Jaap Jumelet , Lisa Bylinina , Willem Zuidema , Jakub Szymanik

Transformer-based models primarily rely on Next Token Prediction (NTP), which predicts the next token in a sequence based on the preceding context. However, NTP's focus on single-token prediction often limits a model's ability to plan ahead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Charlie Wyatt , Aditya Joshi , Flora Salim

Autoregressive language models, pretrained using large text corpora to do well on next word prediction, have been successful at solving many downstream tasks, even with zero-shot usage. However, there is little theoretical understanding of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Nikunj Saunshi , Sadhika Malladi , Sanjeev Arora

The unique capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as the natural language text generation ability, position them as strong candidates for providing explanation for recommendations. However, despite the size of the LLM, most…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-19 Behnam Rahdari , Hao Ding , Ziwei Fan , Yifei Ma , Zhuotong Chen , Anoop Deoras , Branislav Kveton

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to break down complex problems into interpretable intermediate steps, significantly enhancing model transparency and performance in reasoning tasks. However, conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Junda Wu , Yuxin Xiong , Xintong Li , Sheldon Yu , Zhengmian Hu , Tong Yu , Rui Wang , Xiang Chen , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley