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Step-by-step reasoning approaches like chain of thought (CoT) have proved to be very effective in inducing reasoning capabilities in large language models. However, the success of the CoT approach is fundamentally tied to the model size,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-05-19 Kumar Shridhar , Alessandro Stolfo , Mrinmaya Sachan

We present the surprising finding that a language model's reasoning capabilities can be improved by training on synthetic datasets of chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from more capable models, even when all of those traces lead to an incorrect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Abhranil Chandra , Ayush Agrawal , Arian Hosseini , Sebastian Fischmeister , Rishabh Agarwal , Navin Goyal , Aaron Courville

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Xiaomin Li , Zhou Yu , Zhiwei Zhang , Xupeng Chen , Ziji Zhang , Yingying Zhuang , Narayanan Sadagopan , Anurag Beniwal

Compositional generalization -- the ability to understand and generate novel combinations of learned concepts -- enables models to extend their capabilities beyond limited experiences. While effective, the data structures and principles…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Lingjing Kong , Shaoan Xie , Yang Jiao , Yetian Chen , Yanhui Guo , Simone Shao , Yan Gao , Guangyi Chen , Kun Zhang

We study how different Chain-of-Thought (CoT) designs affect the acquisition of the generalizable visual reasoning ability in vision-language models (VLMs). While CoT data, especially long or visual CoT such as "think with image", has been…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Yifan Du , Kun Zhou , Yingqian Min , Yue Ling , Wayne Xin Zhao , Youbin Wu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to tackle com- plex multi-step tasks. While base LLMs, pre-trained on general text corpora, often struggle with reasoning due to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Zijian Wang , Yanxiang Ma , Chang Xu

We investigate how to elicit compositional generalization capabilities in large language models (LLMs). Compositional generalization empowers LLMs to solve complex problems by combining foundational skills, a critical reasoning ability akin…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-18 Jiaao Chen , Xiaoman Pan , Dian Yu , Kaiqiang Song , Xiaoyang Wang , Dong Yu , Jianshu Chen

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Tianqiao Liu , Zui Chen , Zitao Liu , Mi Tian , Weiqi Luo

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs), but its reliance on unstructured text limits interpretability and executability in embodied tasks. Prior work has explored structured CoTs using scene or…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Hongyu Chen , Guangrun Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Zhen Xiong , Yujun Cai , Zhecheng Li , Yiwei Wang

According to the principle of compositional generalization, the meaning of a complex expression can be understood as a function of the meaning of its parts and of how they are combined. This principle is crucial for human language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-19 Sungjun Han , Sebastian Padó

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning through intermediate steps in natural language form. Briefly, CoT enables LLMs to think step by step.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Caoyun Fan , Jidong Tian , Yitian Li , Wenqing Chen , Hao He , Yaohui Jin

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been shown to significantly improve the reasoning accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. However, due to the autoregressive, step-by-step generation paradigm, existing CoT methods suffer from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jiaquan Zhang , Chaoning Zhang , Shuxu Chen , Xudong Wang , Zhenzhen Huang , Pengcheng Zheng , Shuai Yuan , Sheng Zheng , Qigan Sun , Jie Zou , Lik-Hang Lee , Yang Yang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is often viewed as a window into LLM decision-making, yet recent work suggests it may function merely as post-hoc rationalization. This raises a critical alignment question: Does the reasoning trace causally shape…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Pengcheng Wen , Yanxu Zhu , Jiapeng Sun , Han Zhu , Yujin Zhou , Chi-Min Chan , Sirui Han , Yike Guo

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories has become a pivotal phase in building large reasoning models. However, how CoT trajectories from different sources influence the generalization performance of models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zhaoyi Li , Xiangyu Xi , Zhengyu Chen , Wei Wang , Gangwei Jiang , Ranran Shen , Linqi Song , Ying Wei , Defu Lian

Given the intractably large size of the space of proofs, any model that is capable of general deductive reasoning must generalize to proofs of greater complexity. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) possess some…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Abulhair Saparov , Richard Yuanzhe Pang , Vishakh Padmakumar , Nitish Joshi , Seyed Mehran Kazemi , Najoung Kim , He He

A generally intelligent learner should generalize to more complex tasks than it has previously encountered, but the two common paradigms in machine learning -- either training a separate learner per task or training a single learner for all…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-05-09 Michael B. Chang , Abhishek Gupta , Sergey Levine , Thomas L. Griffiths

A key feature of human intelligence is the ability to generalize beyond the training distribution, for instance, parsing longer sentences than seen in the past. Currently, deep neural networks struggle to generalize robustly to such shifts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Soham Dan , Osbert Bastani , Dan Roth

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is known to improve Large Language Models both empirically and in terms of theoretical approximation power. However, our understanding of the inner workings and conditions of apparition of CoT capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Vivien Cabannes , Charles Arnal , Wassim Bouaziz , Alice Yang , Francois Charton , Julia Kempe

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) with a collection of large and diverse instructions has improved the model's generalization to different tasks, even for unseen tasks. However, most existing instruction datasets include only single…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Shirley Anugrah Hayati , Taehee Jung , Tristan Bodding-Long , Sudipta Kar , Abhinav Sethy , Joo-Kyung Kim , Dongyeop Kang