English
Related papers

Related papers: Understanding Hidden Computations in Chain-of-Thou…

200 papers

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

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

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising performance but compromise token efficiency due to verbose reasoning processes. Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) posits that complex problems can be solved more efficiently through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ruihan Gong , Yue Liu , Wenjie Qu , Mingzhe Du , Yufei He , Yingwei Ma , Yulin Chen , Xiang Liu , Yi Wen , Xinfeng Li , Ruidong Wang , Xinzhong Zhu , Bryan Hooi , Jiaheng Zhang

The chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm uses the elicitation of step-by-step rationales as a proxy for reasoning, gradually refining the model's latent representation of a solution. However, it remains unclear just how early a Large Language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Joey David

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning not only enhances large language model performance but also provides critical insights into decision-making processes, marking it as a useful tool for monitoring model intent and planning. However, recent…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting significantly enhances model reasoning, yet its internal mechanisms remain poorly understood. We analyze CoT's operational principles by reversely tracing information flow across decoding, projection, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Hao Yang , Qinghua Zhao , Lei Li , Lingyi Meng , Mengda Yu

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) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Tergel Munkhbat , Namgyu Ho , Seo Hyun Kim , Yongjin Yang , Yujin Kim , Se-Young Yun

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) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, especially when guided by explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that verbalizes intermediate steps. While CoT improves both interpretability and accuracy,…

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

In this work, we examine how targeted perturbations in the activation space of Language Models (LMs) can encode complex reasoning patterns. We inject steering vectors, derived from LM activations, into LMs during inference time and study…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-24 Jason Zhang , Scott Viteri

Detecting harmful AI actions is important as AI agents gain adoption. Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one method widely used to detect adversarial attacks and AI misalignment. However, attackers and misaligned models might evade CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Shiyuan Guo , Henry Sleight , Fabien Roger

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting boosts Large Language Models accuracy on multi-step tasks, yet whether the generated "thoughts" reflect the true internal reasoning process is unresolved. We present the first feature-level causal study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Xi Chen , Aske Plaat , Niki van Stein

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). CoT explicitly encourages the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem, by providing a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Boshi Wang , Sewon Min , Xiang Deng , Jiaming Shen , You Wu , Luke Zettlemoyer , Huan Sun

Large language models have consistently struggled with complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical problem-solving. Investigating the internal reasoning mechanisms of these models can help us design better model architectures and training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Zhiwei Wang , Yunji Wang , Zhongwang Zhang , Zhangchen Zhou , Hui Jin , Tianyang Hu , Jiacheng Sun , Zhenguo Li , Yaoyu Zhang , Zhi-Qin John Xu

It has been shown that the chain of thought (CoT) can enhance the power of large language models (LLMs) to solve certain mathematical reasoning problems. However, the capacity of CoT is still not fully explored. As an important instance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Lijia Yu , Xiao-Shan Gao , Lijun Zhang

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) leverage chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to provide step-by-step rationales, improving performance on complex tasks. Despite its benefits, vanilla CoT often fails to fully verify intermediate inferences and can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-05 Manish Sanwal

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