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Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation trains a smaller model to imitate a teacher's reasoning trace, but it is typically evaluated by final-answer metrics including accuracy. We ask whether gains in answer quality are accompanied by…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Zhaoyang Jiang , Xuanqi Peng , Fei Teng , Zhizhong Fu , Yunsoo Kim , Jiacong Mi , Zicheng Li , Honghan Wu

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are increasingly used for critical tasks, yet they provide no guarantees about the correctness of their solutions. Users must decide whether to trust the model's answer, aided…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Vardhan Palod , Upasana Biswas , Subbarao Kambhampati

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced complex reasoning capabilities, particularly through extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that incorporates mechanisms such as backtracking,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Baohao Liao , Xinyi Chen , Sara Rajaee , Yuhui Xu , Christian Herold , Anders Søgaard , Maarten de Rijke , Christof Monz

Recent advances in natural language processing highlight two key factors for improving reasoning in large language models (LLMs): (i) allocating more test-time compute tends to help on harder problems but often introduces redundancy in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Riccardo Alberghi , Elizaveta Demyanenko , Luca Biggio , Luca Saglietti

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

Recent large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 exhibit strong complex problems solving abilities by generating long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning steps. It is challenging to directly train small language models (SLMs) to emerge long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Zhaoyang Wang , Jinqi Jiang , Tian Qiu , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Huaxiu Yao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, conventional CoT relies on explicitly verbalized intermediate steps, which constrains its broader…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Xinghao Chen , Anhao Zhao , Heming Xia , Xuan Lu , Hanlin Wang , Yanjun Chen , Wei Zhang , Jian Wang , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning has demonstrated remarkable deep reasoning capabilities in both large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, its reliability is often undermined by the accumulation of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Zijun Chen , Wenbo Hu , Richang Hong

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

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) significantly benefit from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in performing various reasoning tasks. While CoT allows models to produce more comprehensive reasoning processes, its emphasis on intermediate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Zhan Ling , Yunhao Fang , Xuanlin Li , Zhiao Huang , Mingu Lee , Roland Memisevic , Hao Su

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown that test-time scaling can substantially improve model performance on complex tasks, particularly in the coding domain. Under this paradigm, models use a larger token budget during…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiaxin Fang , Runyuan He , Sahil Bhatia , Neel Gajare , Alvin Cheung

Large Language Models (LLMs) using Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting excel at complex reasoning but generate verbose thought processes with considerable redundancy, leading to increased inference costs and reduced efficiency. We introduce a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Zeju Li , Jianyuan Zhong , Ziyang Zheng , Xiangyu Wen , Zhijian Xu , Yingying Cheng , Fan Zhang , Qiang Xu

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning to produce an explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) before answering produces models that consistently raise overall performance on code, math, and general-knowledge benchmarks.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-25 Arne Vanhoyweghen , Brecht Verbeken , Andres Algaba , Vincent Ginis

Large Language Model interfaces are increasingly verbose, exposing intermediate reasoning traces alongside final answers. Traces are framed as transparency mechanisms, yet it is unclear how people use them to solve problems. We report a…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Daniela Fernandes , Daniel Buschek , Lev Tankelevitch , Thomas Kosch , Robin Welsch

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning exposes the intermediate thinking process of large language models (LLMs), yet verifying those traces at scale remains unsolved. In response, we introduce the idea of decision pivots-minimal, verifiable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dongkyu Cho , Amy B. Z. Zhang , Bilel Fehri , Sheng Wang , Rumi Chunara , Hengrui Cai , Rui Song

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) generate explicit reasoning traces alongside final answers, yet the extent to which these traces influence answer generation remains unclear. In this work, we conduct a three-stage investigation into the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jue Zhang , Qingwei Lin , Saravan Rajmohan , Dongmei Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a foundational technique for eliciting reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the robustness of this approach to corruptions in intermediate reasoning steps remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Ashwath Vaithinathan Aravindan , Mayank Kejriwal

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enhances performance of large language models, but questions remain about whether these reasoning traces faithfully reflect the internal processes of the model. We present the first comprehensive study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Sriram Balasubramanian , Samyadeep Basu , Soheil Feizi