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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used inference-time technique for improving reasoning, yet its gains are uneven across tasks. We analyze when and why CoT helps by modeling the step-wise reasoning trajectory as a Markov chain.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zihan Wang , Yijun Dong , Qi Lei

Large language models can generate long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet prior work suggests that CoT can be post-hoc rationalization rather than a faithful reflection of the computation through explicitly designed settings. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiachen Zhao , Yiyou Sun , Weiyan Shi , Dawn Song

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been highly successful in solving complex tasks in natural language processing, and recent multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have extended this paradigm to video reasoning. However, these models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Yiwu Zhong , Zi-Yuan Hu , Yin Li , Liwei Wang

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

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) decoding enables language models to improve reasoning performance at the cost of high generation latency in decoding. Recent proposals have explored variants of contemplation tokens, a term we introduce that refers to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jeffrey Cheng , Benjamin Van Durme

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning and planning when trained on chainof-thought (CoT) data, where the step-by-step thought process is explicitly outlined by text tokens. However, this results in lengthy inputs where many words…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 DiJia Su , Hanlin Zhu , Yingchen Xu , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Qinqing Zheng

It has been shown that the chain of thought (CoT) can enhance the power of large language models (LLMs) to solve certain mathematical reasoning problems. However, the capacity of CoT is still not fully explored. As an important instance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Lijia Yu , Xiao-Shan Gao , Lijun Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has widely enhanced mathematical reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but it still remains challenging for extending it to multimodal domains. Existing works either adopt a similar textual reasoning for image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xinyan Chen , Renrui Zhang , Dongzhi Jiang , Aojun Zhou , Shilin Yan , Weifeng Lin , Hongsheng Li

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been proposed as a way of assisting LLMs in performing complex reasoning. However, developing effective prompts can be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Yuxin Tang

Despite superior reasoning prowess demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a lack of understanding prevails around the internal mechanisms of the models that facilitate CoT generation. This work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Subhabrata Dutta , Joykirat Singh , Soumen Chakrabarti , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Tergel Munkhbat , Namgyu Ho , Seo Hyun Kim , Yongjin Yang , Yujin Kim , Se-Young Yun

Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable improvements in mathematical reasoning capabilities through long Chain-of-Thought. The reasoning tokens of these models enable self-correction within reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Yu Cui , Bryan Hooi , Yujun Cai , Yiwei Wang

Latent or continuous chain-of-thought methods replace explicit textual rationales with a number of internal latent steps, but these intermediate computations are difficult to evaluate beyond correlation-based probes. In this paper, we view…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zirui Li , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yizhi Li , Jian Yang , Chenghua Lin , Min Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving complex reasoning tasks through mechanisms like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which emphasizes verbose, step-by-step reasoning. However, humans typically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Silei Xu , Wenhao Xie , Lingxiao Zhao , Pengcheng He

A common approach for teaching large language models (LLMs) to reason is to train on chain-of-thought (CoT) traces of in-distribution reasoning problems, but such annotated data is costly to obtain for every problem of interest. We want…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Fangcong Yin , Zeyu Leo Liu , Liu Leqi , Xi Ye , Greg Durrett

Continuous chain-of-thought has been shown to be effective in saving reasoning tokens for large language models. By reasoning with continuous latent thought tokens, continuous CoT is able to perform implicit reasoning in a compact manner.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Haoyi Wu , Zhihao Teng , Kewei Tu

Intermediate token generation (ITG), where a model produces output before the solution, has been proposed as a method to improve the performance of language models on reasoning tasks. While these reasoning traces or Chain of Thoughts (CoTs)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Vardhan Palod , Karthik Valmeekam , Kaya Stechly , Subbarao Kambhampati

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