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Related papers: Unveiling and Causalizing CoT: A Causal Pespective

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Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on code generation, but the mechanisms by which Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical and information-theoretic study of CoT…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Naizhu Jin , Zhong Li , Guang Yang , Tian Zhang , Qingkai Zeng

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

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

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) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manqing Liu , David Williams-King , Ida Caspary , Linh Le , Hannes Whittingham , Puria Radmard , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and its variants have gained popularity as effective methods for solving multi-step reasoning problems using pretrained large language models (LLMs). In this work, we analyze CoT prompting from a statistical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-29 Xinyang Hu , Fengzhuo Zhang , Siyu Chen , Zhuoran Yang

Large language models (LLMs) have unveiled remarkable reasoning capabilities by exploiting chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which generates intermediate reasoning chains to serve as the rationale for deriving the answer. However, current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Anni Zou , Zhuosheng Zhang , Hai Zhao , Xiangru Tang

With the rise of Large Language Models(LLMs), it has become crucial to understand their capabilities and limitations in deciphering and explaining the complex web of causal relationships that language entails. Current methods use either…

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

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) monitoring has emerged as a compelling method for detecting harmful behaviors such as reward hacking for reasoning models, under the assumption that models' reasoning processes are informative of such behaviors. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Nikolaus Howe , Micah Carroll

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps models think step by step. But naive CoT breaks down in visually grounded social tasks, where models must perceive, understand, and judge all at once; bridging perception with norm-grounded reasoning.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Eunkyu Park , Wesley Hanwen Deng , Gunhee Kim , Motahhare Eslami , Maarten Sap

The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm has emerged as a critical approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, despite their widespread adoption and success, CoT methods often exhibit instability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Yu Wang , Shiwan Zhao , Zhihu Wang , Heyuan Huang , Ming Fan , Yubo Zhang , Zhixing Wang , Haijun Wang , Ting Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing and hold immense potential for advancing Artificial Intelligence. However, the core architecture of most mainstream LLMs -- the Transformer -- has inherent…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Xiang Zhang , Dujian Ding

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has marked a significant advancement in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Previous studies have developed various extensions of CoT, which focus primarily on enhancing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Xin Xu , Shizhe Diao , Can Yang , Yang Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which breaks down complex tasks into intermediate reasoning steps, has significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) on challenging tasks. However, the detailed reasoning process in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Yingqian Cui , Pengfei He , Jingying Zeng , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Zhenwei Dai , Yan Han , Chen Luo , Jing Huang , Zhen Li , Suhang Wang , Yue Xing , Jiliang Tang , Qi He

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a critical technique in enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), and latent reasoning methods have been proposed to accelerate the inefficient token-level reasoning chain. We notice that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Fangwei Zhu , Zhifang Sui

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) holds a significant place in augmenting the reasoning performance for large language models (LLMs). While some studies focus on improving CoT accuracy through methods like retrieval enhancement, yet a rigorous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Lijie Hu , Liang Liu , Shu Yang , Xin Chen , Hongru Xiao , Mengdi Li , Pan Zhou , Muhammad Asif Ali , Di Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning provides a significant performance uplift to LLMs by enabling planning, exploration, and deliberation of their actions. CoT is also a powerful tool for monitoring the behaviours of these agents: when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nathaniel Mitrani Hadida , Sassan Bhanji , Cameron Tice , Puria Radmard