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Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is proposed as a method for overseeing the internal reasoning of language-model agents. Prior work has shown that when models are explicitly informed that their reasoning is being monitored, or are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Thomas Jiralerspong , Flemming Kondrup , Yoshua Bengio

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language models (LLMs) on difficult tasks, but it also makes inference expensive because every intermediate step must be generated as a discrete token. Latent reasoning reduces visible token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xuan Li , Yining Wang , Yuchen Liu , Guanjun Liu , Delai Qiu , Shengping Liu , Jiaen Liang , Wei Huang , Jun Yu , Junnan Zhu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enhances performance of large language models, but questions remain about whether these reasoning traces faithfully reflect the internal processes of the model. We present the first comprehensive study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Sriram Balasubramanian , Samyadeep Basu , Soheil Feizi

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Miles Turpin , Julian Michael , Ethan Perez , Samuel R. Bowman

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

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

This study investigates the internal information flow of large language models (LLMs) while performing chain-of-thought (CoT) style reasoning. Specifically, with a particular interest in the faithfulness of the CoT explanation to LLMs'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Keito Kudo , Yoichi Aoki , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Shusaku Sone , Masaya Taniguchi , Ana Brassard , Keisuke Sakaguchi , Kentaro Inui

Most efforts to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) involve either scaling the number of parameters and the size of training data, or scaling inference computation by letting models generate complex chains of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yeskendir Koishekenov , Aldo Lipani , Nicola Cancedda

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a de-facto standard technique to elicit reasoning-like responses from large language models (LLMs), allowing them to spell out individual steps before giving a final answer. While the resemblance to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Gregor Bachmann , Yichen Jiang , Seyed Mohsen Moosavi Dezfooli , Moin Nabi

The performance of modern language models (LMs) has been improved by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, i.e., the process of generating intermediate results that guide the model towards a final answer. A possible explanation for this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Franz Nowak , Anej Svete , Alexandra Butoi , Ryan Cotterell

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing implementations, such as in-context learning and fine-tuning, remain costly and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Li Li , Ziyi Wang , Yongliang Wu , Jianfei Cai , Xu Yang

Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on generating explicit tokens step by step, and their effectiveness typically hinges on large-scale supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haoyu Zheng , Zhuonan Wang , Yuqian Yuan , Tianwei Lin , Wenqiao Zhang , Zheqi Lv , Juncheng Li , Siliang Tang , Yueting Zhuang , Hongyang He

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

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning abilities, often attributed to few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While effective, these methods require labor-intensive prompt engineering, raising the question of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-19 Hyunbin Jin , Je Won Yeom , Seunghyun Bae , Taesup Kim

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Jiahao Cheng , Tiancheng Su , Jia Yuan , Guoxiu He , Jiawei Liu , Xinqi Tao , Jingwen Xie , Huaxia Li

Test-time scaling has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning, yet the limitations of current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation obscures whether performance gains stem from genuine reasoning or mere verbosity. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhizhang Fu , Yuancheng Gu , Chenkai Hu , Hanmeng Liu , Yue Zhang

While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it requires models to verbalize every intermediate step in text tokens, constraining the model thoughts to the discrete vocabulary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Weihao Liu , Dehai Min , Lu Cheng

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

Scaling inference compute enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs), with long chains-of-thought (CoTs) enabling strategies like backtracking and error correction. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial method for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Edward Yeo , Yuxuan Tong , Morry Niu , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

Whether intermediate reasoning is computationally useful or merely explanatory depends on whether chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contain task-relevant information. We present a mechanistic causal analysis of CoT on GSM8K using activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Houman Mehrafarin , Amit Parekh , Ioannis Konstas