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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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Jean-Francois Ton , Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq , Yang Liu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has unlocked advanced reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with intermediate steps, yet incurs prohibitive computational costs due to generation of extra tokens. Recent studies empirically show that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Juncai Li , Ru Li , Yuxiang Zhou , Boxiang Ma , Jeff Z. Pan

Large language models (LLMs) often benefit from intermediate steps of reasoning to generate answers to complex problems. When these intermediate steps of reasoning are used to monitor the activity of the model, it is essential that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-02 Fabien Roger , Ryan Greenblatt

Recent progress in reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) has been driven by introducing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces, where models generate intermediate reasoning traces before producing an answer. These traces, as in DeepSeek…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Siddhant Bhambri , Upasana Biswas , Subbarao Kambhampati

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in large language models' (LLMs) reasoning, which is largely due to the chain-of-thought (CoT) approaches, allowing models to generate intermediate reasoning steps before reaching the final…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Zuoli Tang , Junjie Ou , Kaiqin Hu , Chunwei Wu , Zhaoxin Huan , Chilin Fu , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Chenliang Li

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods offer a token-efficient alternative to explicit CoT reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but a persistent performance gap has limited their adoption. We identify a core latent instability issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Xilin Wei , Xiaoran Liu , Yuhang Zang , Xiaoyi Dong , Yuhang Cao , Jiaqi Wang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

In enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), prior research primarily focuses on specific prompting techniques such as few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. These methods, while effective, often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Xuezhi Wang , Denny Zhou

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a common technique for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extended reasoning is often unnecessary and substantially increases token usage. As such, a key question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

What makes a difference in the post-training of LLMs? We investigate the training patterns of different layers in large language models (LLMs) through the lens of the gradient. We are specifically interested in how fast vs. slow thinking…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Ming Li , Yanhong Li , Tianyi Zhou

Recent advances in reasoning-focused Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces - intermediate reasoning steps generated before a final answer. These traces, as in DeepSeek R1, guide inference and train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Siddhant Bhambri , Upasana Biswas , Subbarao Kambhampati

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong generalization across a wide range of tasks. Reasoning with LLMs is central to solving multi-step problems and complex decision-making. To support efficient reasoning, recent studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Jindong Li , Yali Fu , Li Fan , Jiahong Liu , Yao Shu , Chengwei Qin , Menglin Yang , Irwin King , Rex Ying

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) elicits reasoning in large language models by explicitly generating intermediate tokens. In contrast, latent thought reasoning operates directly in the continuous latent space, enabling computation beyond discrete…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kevin Xu , Issei Sato

Large Language Models (LLMs) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting excel at complex reasoning but generate verbose thought processes with considerable redundancy, leading to increased inference costs and reduced efficiency. We introduce a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Zeju Li , Jianyuan Zhong , Ziyang Zheng , Xiangyu Wen , Zhijian Xu , Yingying Cheng , Fan Zhang , Qiang Xu

We study how to extend chain-of-thought (CoT) beyond language to better handle multimodal reasoning. While CoT helps LLMs and VLMs articulate intermediate steps, its text-only form often fails on vision-intensive problems where key…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yifei Shao , Kun Zhou , Ziming Xu , Mohammad Atif Quamar , Shibo Hao , Zhen Wang , Zhiting Hu , Biwei Huang

Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent-CoT) aims to enable step-by-step computation without emitting long rationales, yet its mechanisms remain unclear. We study CODI, a continuous-thought teacher-student distillation model, on strictly sequential…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Jia Liang , Liangming Pan

Alignment techniques often inadvertently induce sycophancy in LLMs. While prior studies studied this behaviour in direct-answer settings, the role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning remains under-explored: does it serve as a logical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Zhaoxin Feng , Zheng Chen , Jianfei Ma , Yip Tin Po , Emmanuele Chersoni , Bo Li