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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been a widely adopted prompting method, eliciting impressive reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Inspired by the sequential thought structure of CoT, a number of Chain-of-X (CoX) methods have been…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Yu Xia , Rui Wang , Xu Liu , Mingyan Li , Tong Yu , Xiang Chen , Julian McAuley , Shuai Li

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve highly effective performance on various reasoning tasks by incorporating step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting as demonstrations. However, the reasoning chains of demonstrations generated by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Jiashuo Sun , Yi Luo , Yeyun Gong , Chen Lin , Yelong Shen , Jian Guo , Nan Duan

Large language Models (LLMs) have achieved promising performance on arithmetic reasoning tasks by incorporating step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, LLMs face challenges in maintaining factual consistency during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Tianci Xue , Ziqi Wang , Zhenhailong Wang , Chi Han , Pengfei Yu , Heng Ji

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior capacities in solving complicated problems by generating long chain-of-thoughts (CoT), but such a lengthy CoT incurs high inference costs. Previous methods on inference-stage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Minjia Mao , Bowen Yin , Yu Zhu , Xiao Fang

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

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

Language models (LMs) with less than 100B parameters are known to perform poorly on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in contrast to large LMs when solving unseen tasks. In this work, we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Seungone Kim , Se June Joo , Doyoung Kim , Joel Jang , Seonghyeon Ye , Jamin Shin , Minjoon Seo

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in complex reasoning tasks like mathematical problem-solving. However, existing research predominantly relies on reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 ShaoZhen Liu , Xinting Huang , Houwen Peng , Xin Chen , Xinyang Song , Qi Li , Zhenan Sun

Chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, which provide step-by-step reasoning to derive final answers, benefit LLMs in both inference and training. Incorporating rationales, either by generating them before answering during inference, or by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Wenhang Shi , Shuqing Bian , Yiren Chen , Xinyi Zhang , Zhe Zhao , Pengfei Hu , Wei Lu , Xiaoyong Du

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

Recent advances in large reasoning language models (LRLMs) rely on test-time scaling, which extends long chain-of-thought (CoT) generation to solve complex tasks. However, overthinking in long CoT not only slows down the efficiency of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Chenxu Yang , Qingyi Si , Yongjie Duan , Zheliang Zhu , Chenyu Zhu , Qiaowei Li , Minghui Chen , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yuntian Tang , Bohan Jia , Wenxuan Huang , Lianyue Zhang , Jiao Xie , Wenxi Li , Wei Li , Jie Hu , Xinghao Chen Rongrong Ji , Shaohui Lin

Chain of Thought (CoT) of multi-step benefits from the logical structure of the reasoning steps and task-specific actions, significantly enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models. As the prevalence of long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-07 Wen Yang , Minpeng Liao , Kai Fan

Training LLMs to think and reason for longer has become a key ingredient in building state-of-the-art models that can solve complex problems previously out of reach. Recent efforts pursue this in different ways, such as RL fine-tuning to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yihao Xue , Allan Zhang , Jianhao Huang , Amit Sahai , Baharan Mirzasoleiman

Current research found the issue of Early Answering in large language models (LLMs), where the models already have an answer before generating the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). This phenomenon suggests a potential lack of necessary dependency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Zezhong Wang , Xingshan Zeng , Weiwen Liu , Yufei Wang , Liangyou Li , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu , Kam-Fai Wong

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being employed in real-world applications in critical domains such as healthcare, it is important to ensure that the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning generated by these models faithfully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Sree Harsha Tanneru , Dan Ley , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation from Large Language Models (LLMs) often induces "overthinking" in Small Language Models (SLMs), leading to performance degradation and excessive token consumption. In this study, we propose Disciplined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Shunsuke Ubukata

We propose a novel framework, Meta Chain-of-Thought (Meta-CoT), which extends traditional Chain-of-Thought (CoT) by explicitly modeling the underlying reasoning required to arrive at a particular CoT. We present empirical evidence from…

Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these methods often suffer from overthinking, leading to unnecessarily lengthy or redundant…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Zhensheng Jin , Xinze Li , Yifan Ji , Chunyi Peng , Zhenghao Liu , Qi Shi , Yukun Yan , Shuo Wang , Furong Peng , Ge Yu