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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting substantially improves the sample efficiency of transformers, reducing the complexity of tasks like parity learning from exponential to polynomial in the input length. However, generating explicit reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yixiao Huang , Hanlin Zhu , Zixuan Wang , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell , Somayeh Sojoudi , Song Mei

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly in arithmetic and reasoning tasks, by instructing the model to produce intermediate reasoning steps.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Jianhao Huang , Zixuan Wang , Jason D. Lee

Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision can substantially improve transformer performance, yet the mechanisms by which models learn to follow and benefit from CoT remain poorly understood. We investigate these learning dynamics through the lens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Zihan Pengmei , Costas Mavromatis , Zhengyuan Shen , Yunyi Zhang , Vassilis N. Ioannidis , Huzefa Rangwala

Instructing the model to generate a sequence of intermediate steps, a.k.a., a chain of thought (CoT), is a highly effective method to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on arithmetics and symbolic reasoning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zhiyuan Li , Hong Liu , Denny Zhou , Tengyu Ma

The ability to reason lies at the core of artificial intelligence (AI), and challenging problems usually call for deeper and longer reasoning to tackle. A crucial question about AI reasoning is whether models can extrapolate learned…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Yu Huang , Zixin Wen , Aarti Singh , Yuejie Chi , Yuxin Chen

Transformers have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in multi-step reasoning tasks. However, understandings of the underlying mechanisms by which they acquire these abilities through training remain limited, particularly from a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Tong Yang , Yu Huang , Yingbin Liang , Yuejie Chi

Language recognition tasks are fundamental in natural language processing (NLP) and have been widely used to benchmark the performance of large language models (LLMs). These tasks also play a crucial role in explaining the working…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Ruiquan Huang , Yingbin Liang , Jing Yang

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

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

Chain of Thought (CoT) has been applied to various large language models (LLMs) and proven to be effective in improving the quality of outputs. In recent studies, transformers are proven to have absolute upper bounds in terms of expressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Lang Yin , Debangshu Banerjee , Gagandeep Singh

Recent studies have discovered that Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) can dramatically improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when dealing with complex tasks involving mathematics or reasoning. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guhao Feng , Bohang Zhang , Yuntian Gu , Haotian Ye , Di He , Liwei Wang

Large language models have shown remarkable reasoning abilities and scaling laws suggest that large parameter count, especially along the depth axis, is the primary driver. In this work, we make a stronger claim -- many reasoning problems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nikunj Saunshi , Nishanth Dikkala , Zhiyuan Li , Sanjiv Kumar , Sashank J. Reddi

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

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zongqian Wu , Baoduo Xu , Ruochen Cui , Mengmeng Zhan , Xiaofeng Zhu , Lei Feng

Several recent works demonstrate that transformers can implement algorithms like gradient descent. By a careful construction of weights, these works show that multiple layers of transformers are expressive enough to simulate iterations of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-13 Kwangjun Ahn , Xiang Cheng , Hadi Daneshmand , Suvrit Sra

Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought). Yet the mechanism by which sparse rewards drive policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yuval Ran-Milo , Yotam Alexander , Shahar Mendel , Nadav Cohen

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a method that enables language models to handle complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler steps. Despite its success, the underlying mechanics of CoT are not yet fully understood. In an attempt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Yingcong Li , Kartik Sreenivasan , Angeliki Giannou , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

Transformers demonstrate impressive performance on a range of reasoning benchmarks. To evaluate the degree to which these abilities are a result of actual reasoning, existing work has focused on developing sophisticated benchmarks for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jannik Brinkmann , Abhay Sheshadri , Victor Levoso , Paul Swoboda , Christian Bartelt

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables reasoning in language models but requires explicit verbalization of intermediate steps. Looped transformers offer an alternative by iteratively refining representations within hidden states. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Markus Frey , Behzad Shomali , Ali Hamza Bashir , David Berghaus , Joachim Koehler , Mehdi Ali
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