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Large reasoning models (LRMs) often consume excessive tokens, inflating computational cost and latency. More broadly, in goal reaching sequential decision problems we often want to reach the goal quickly, and LRM reasoning can be viewed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Alex Ayoub , Kavosh Asadi , Dale Schuurmans , Csaba Szepesvári , Karim Bouyarmane

How much is 56 times 37? Language models often make mistakes in these types of difficult calculations. This is usually explained by their inability to perform complex reasoning. Since language models rely on large training sets and great…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-15 David Herel , Tomas Mikolov

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) heavily rely on scaling test-time compute to perform complex reasoning tasks by generating extensive "thinking" chains. While demonstrating impressive results, this approach incurs significant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Michael Hassid , Gabriel Synnaeve , Yossi Adi , Roy Schwartz

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the standard paradigm for enabling Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex problems. However, recent studies reveal a sharp performance drop in reasoning hop generalization scenarios, where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-04 Zhaoyi Li , Jiatong Li , Gangwei Jiang , Linqi Song , Defu Lian , Ying Wei

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become a central mechanism for eliciting multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet recent evidence presents a tension: hidden states appear to already encode future reasoning before CoT…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Liyan Xu , Mo Yu , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou

Reasoning models improve their problem-solving ability through inference-time scaling, allocating more compute via longer token budgets. Identifying which reasoning traces are likely to succeed remains a key opportunity: reliably predicting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Martina G. Vilas , Safoora Yousefi , Besmira Nushi , Eric Horvitz , Vidhisha Balachandran

Recent large language models have shown promising capabilities in long-form reasoning, following structured chains of thought before arriving at a final answer. However, we observe that these reasoning paths tend to include substantial…

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yang , Ke Lin , Xing Yu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly advanced performance on complex tasks, yet their tendency to overthink introduces inefficiencies. This study investigates the internal mechanisms of reinforcement learning (RL)-trained LRMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rongzhi Zhu , Yi Liu , Zequn Sun , Yiwei Wang , Wei Hu

Despite rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), the token-level autoregressive nature constrains their complex reasoning capabilities. To enhance LLM reasoning, inference-time techniques, including…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Qianyue Hao , Sibo Li , Jian Yuan , Yong Li

In information retrieval, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in text reranking tasks by leveraging their sophisticated natural language understanding and advanced reasoning capabilities. However,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Haowei Liu , Xuyang Wu , Guohao Sun , Zhiqiang Tao , Yi Fang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce explicit reflective traces during complex reasoning, accompanied by anthropomorphic markers such as wait, hmm, and alternatively. Although these markers are commonly used as visible indicators of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yahan Yu , Noa Nakanishi , Fei Cheng

AI systems that output their reasoning in natural language offer an opportunity for safety -- we can \emph{monitor} their chain of thought (CoT) for undesirable reasoning, such as the pursuit of harmful objectives. However, the extent to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Matt MacDermott , Qiyao Wei , Rada Djoneva , Francis Rhys Ward

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to clinical care, a domain where both accuracy and transparent reasoning are critical for safe and trustworthy deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which elicits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Jiageng Wu , Kevin Xie , Bowen Gu , Nils Krüger , Kueiyu Joshua Lin , Jie Yang

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit failures on elementary symbolic tasks such as character counting in a word, despite excelling on complex benchmarks. Although this limitation has been noted, the internal reasons remain unclear. We use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Ayan Datta , Mounika Marreddy , Alexander Mehler , Zhixue Zhao , Radhika Mamidi

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs) but often leads to verbose and redundant outputs, thus increasing inference cost. We hypothesize that many reasoning steps are unnecessary for producing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xin Liu , Lu Wang

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

Extending Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) faces a fundamental challenge: their responses inherently interleave perception-related tokens, which ground visual content, with…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-27 Jinda Lu , Junkang Wu , Jinghan Li , Kexin Huang , Shuo Yang , Guoyin Wang , Jiancan Wu , Xiang Wang , Xiangnan He

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in code generation. The integration of Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning can further boost their performance. However, current CoT methods often require manual writing or…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2024-08-06 Guang Yang , Yu Zhou , Xiang Chen , Xiangyu Zhang , Terry Yue Zhuo , Taolue Chen

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Mingyu Jin , Qinkai Yu , Dong Shu , Haiyan Zhao , Wenyue Hua , Yanda Meng , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du