Related papers: Rethinking Thinking Tokens: Understanding Why They…

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…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in eliciting structured reasoning (i.e., CoT reasoning) from large language models (LLMs). Regardless of its popularity, recent studies expose its failures in some reasoning…

Decoding strategies play a central role in shaping the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs). Traditional methods such as greedy decoding and beam search often suffer from error propagation, while sampling-based approaches…

The long chain-of-thought (LongCoT) capability is central to the recent breakthroughs achieved by large language models in complex reasoning tasks. However, the accompanying issue of ''underthinking'', where models exhibit shallow reasoning…

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly capable, but the mechanisms of their thinking and decision-making processes remain unclear. Chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) have been commonly utilized to externalize LLMs' thinking, but this…

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI o1, have demonstrated strong performance gains by scaling up the length of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning during inference. However, a growing concern lies in their…

We propose a novel class of language models, Latent Thought Models (LTMs), which incorporate explicit latent thought vectors that follow an explicit prior model in latent space. These latent thought vectors guide the autoregressive…

Reinforcement-learning-based post-training has become a key approach for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, but its token-level learning signals remain poorly understood. This work studies their heterogeneity through…

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) perform multi-step latent reasoning prior to token generation and outperform conventional LLMs on reasoning benchmarks at smaller parameter budgets. However, attempts to further improve LoopLM reasoning with…

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a training…

Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at problem solving by generating chain of thoughts in natural language, but such verbal thinking is computationally costly and prone to overthinking. A recent work instead proposes a latent thinking…

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…

Large language models (LLMs) tackle complex tasks by generating long chains of thought or "reasoning traces" that act as latent variables in the generation of an output given a query. A model's ability to generate such traces can be…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit \textit{hallucinations}, generating factually incorrect or semantically irrelevant content in response to prompts. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can mitigate hallucinations by encouraging…

Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs (MLL-Ms) excel at chain-of-thought reasoning but face distribution shift at test-time and a lack of verifiable supervision. Recent test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) methods derive…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress across domains, yet their ability to perform inductive reasoning - inferring latent rules from sparse examples - remains limited. It is often assumed that chain-of-thought (CoT)…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in complex reasoning tasks through the use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, allowing models to break down problems into manageable sub-tasks. However, existing CoT…

Thinking LLMs produce reasoning traces before answering. Prior activation steering work mainly targets on shaping these traces. It remains less understood how answer tokens actually read and integrate the reasoning to produce reliable…

Large reasoning models (LRMs), such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, harness test-time scaling to perform multi-step reasoning for complex problem-solving. This reasoning process, executed before producing final answers, is often guided by…