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Despite the remarkable successes of large language models (LLMs), the underlying Transformer architecture has inherent limitations in handling complex reasoning tasks. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a practical workaround,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Jiaqi Wei , Chenyu You , Dujian Ding

Curriculum learning (CL), motivated by the intuition that learning in increasing order of difficulty should ease generalization, is commonly adopted both in pre-training and post-training of large language models (LLMs). The intuition of CL…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Maximilian Mordig , Andreas Opedal , Weiyang Liu , Bernhard Schölkopf

Recent research has highlighted that Large Language Models (LLMs), even when trained to generate extended long reasoning steps, still face significant challenges on hard reasoning problems. However, much of the existing literature relies on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Fanzeng Xia , Yidong Luo , Tinko Sebastian Bartels , Yaqi Xu , Tongxin Li

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance by generating long chains of thought, but longer traces always introduce redundant or ineffective reasoning steps. One typical behavior is that they often perform unnecessary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Jinyi Han , Zixiang Di , Zishang Jiang , Ying Liao , Jiaqing Liang , Yongqi Wang , Yanghua Xiao

Listwise reranking utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) has achieved state-of-the-art retrieval effectiveness. Recently, reasoning-enhanced models have further pushed these boundaries by employing Chain-of-Thought (CoT) to perform deep…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Danyang Liu , Kan Li

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Baohao Liao , Hanze Dong , Yuhui Xu , Doyen Sahoo , Christof Monz , Junnan Li , Caiming Xiong

Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive performance on complex mathematical benchmarks yet sometimes fail on basic math reasoning while generating unnecessarily verbose responses. In this paper, we present LLMThinkBench, a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Gaurav Srivastava , Aafiya Hussain , Sriram Srinivasan , Xuan Wang

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Mingyu Jin , Qinkai Yu , Dong Shu , Haiyan Zhao , Wenyue Hua , Yanda Meng , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable capabilities, rely on singular, pre-dominant reasoning paradigms, hindering their performance on intricate problems that demand diverse cognitive strategies. To address this, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Zishan Ahmad , Saisubramaniam Gopalakrishnan

Large Language Models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities have achieved state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of tasks. Despite its empirical success, the tasks and model scales at which reasoning becomes effective, as well as its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Nicolas Boizard , Hippolyte Gisserot-Boukhlef , Kevin El-Haddad , Céline Hudelot , Pierre Colombo

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has become a foundation for eliciting multi-step reasoning in large language models, but recent studies show that its benefits do not scale monotonically with chain length: while longer CoT generally enables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bin Lei , Caiwen Ding , Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Xin Eric Wang

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated the effectiveness of test-time scaling, where extended reasoning processes substantially enhance model performance. Despite this, current…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-26 Xiaoyu Tian , Sitong Zhao , Haotian Wang , Shuaiting Chen , Yunjie Ji , Yiping Peng , Han Zhao , Xiangang Li

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in large language models' (LLMs) reasoning, which is largely due to the chain-of-thought (CoT) approaches, allowing models to generate intermediate reasoning steps before reaching the final…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Zuoli Tang , Junjie Ou , Kaiqin Hu , Chunwei Wu , Zhaoxin Huan , Chilin Fu , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Chenliang Li

Theory of Mind (ToM) assesses whether models can infer hidden mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, which is essential for natural social interaction. Although recent progress in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) has boosted…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Nanxu Gong , Haotian Li , Sixun Dong , Jianxun Lian , Yanjie Fu , Xing Xie

Large language models (LLMs) can often produce substantially better outputs when allowed to use additional test-time computation, such as sampling, chain of thought, backtracking, or revising partial solutions. Despite the growing empirical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Amir Azarmehr , Soheil Behnezhad , Alma Ghafari

Reinforcement learning (RL) has been pivotal in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it often suffers from limited exploration and entropy collapse, where models exploit a narrow set of solutions,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Shijia Kang , Muhan Zhang

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is intended to improve their reasoning capabilities, yet we uncover a counterintuitive effect: models often forget how to solve problems they previously answered correctly during training. We term…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yuetai Li , Zhangchen Xu , Fengqing Jiang , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Luyao Niu , Bill Yuchen Lin , Xiang Yue , Radha Poovendran

We introduce seqBench, a parametrized benchmark for probing sequential reasoning limits in Large Language Models (LLMs) through precise, multi-dimensional control over several key complexity dimensions. seqBench allows systematic variation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Mohammad Ramezanali , Mo Vazifeh , Paolo Santi

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with multi-step reasoning, where inference-time scaling has emerged as a promising strategy for performance improvement. Verifier-guided search outperforms repeated sampling when sample size is limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Fei Yu , Yingru Li , Benyou Wang

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