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While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting boosts Language Models' (LM) performance on a gamut of complex reasoning tasks, the generated reasoning chain does not necessarily reflect how the model arrives at the answer (aka. faithfulness). We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Qing Lyu , Shreya Havaldar , Adam Stein , Li Zhang , Delip Rao , Eric Wong , Marianna Apidianaki , Chris Callison-Burch

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

Explicit reasoning models are trained to produce intermediate reasoning traces before final answers, but downstream fine-tuning is often performed on ordinary instruction-response data that contains no such traces. We show that this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Lukas Twist , Helen Yannakoudakis , Jie M. Zhang

Requiring a large language model (LLM) to generate intermediary reasoning steps, known as Chain of Thought (CoT), has been shown to be an effective way of boosting performance. Previous approaches have focused on generating multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Haritz Puerto , Tilek Chubakov , Xiaodan Zhu , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

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

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

Large reasoning models (LRMs) spend substantial test-time compute on long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, but what *characterizes* an effective CoT remains unclear. While prior work reports gains from lengthening CoTs and increasing review…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Yunzhen Feng , Julia Kempe , Cheng Zhang , Parag Jain , Anthony Hartshorn

Evaluating open-ended outputs from large language models (LLMs) remains challenging due to the absence of ground truth. Existing metrics rely on final-answer accuracy or surface-level statistics, leaving the reasoning process itself…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yundong Kim , Heyoung Yang

Large language models (LMs) beyond a certain scale, demonstrate the emergent capability of generating free-text rationales for their predictions via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While CoT can yield dramatically improved performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-01 Peifeng Wang , Zhengyang Wang , Zheng Li , Yifan Gao , Bing Yin , Xiang Ren

This study investigates the internal information flow of large language models (LLMs) while performing chain-of-thought (CoT) style reasoning. Specifically, with a particular interest in the faithfulness of the CoT explanation to LLMs'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Keito Kudo , Yoichi Aoki , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Shusaku Sone , Masaya Taniguchi , Ana Brassard , Keisuke Sakaguchi , Kentaro Inui

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) significantly enhances formal reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) by training them to explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps. While LLMs readily benefit from such techniques, improving…

Reasoning LLMs (RLLMs) generate step-by-step chains of thought (CoTs) before giving an answer, which improves performance on complex tasks and makes reasoning more transparent. But how robust are these reasoning traces to disruptions that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Alexander von Recum , Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

It has been well-known that Chain-of-Thought can remarkably enhance LLMs' performance on complex tasks. However, because it also introduces slower inference speeds and higher computational costs, many researches have attempted to use…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Yijiong Yu

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong reasoning capabilities for many tasks, often by explicitly decomposing the task via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Recent work on LLM-based translation designs hand-crafted prompts to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Di Wu , Seth Aycock , Christof Monz

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs) but often leads to verbose and redundant outputs, thus increasing inference cost. We hypothesize that many reasoning steps are unnecessary for producing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xin Liu , Lu Wang

Language model (LM) "reasoning", commonly described as Chain-of-Thought or test-time scaling, often improves benchmark performance, but the dynamics underlying this process remain poorly understood. We study these dynamics through the lens…

Reasoning in language models is difficult to evaluate: natural-language traces are unverifiable, symbolic datasets are too small, and most benchmarks conflate heuristics with inference. We present FOL-Traces, the first large-scale dataset…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Isabelle Lee , Sarah Liaw , Dani Yogatama

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

In recent years, the detection of AI-generated text has become a critical area of research due to concerns about academic integrity, misinformation, and ethical AI deployment. This paper presents COT Fine-tuned, a novel framework for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-24 Shifali Agrahari , Sanasam Ranbir Singh

Language models trained via outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to reason using chain-of-thought (CoT) have shown remarkable performance. Monitoring such a model's CoT may allow us to understand its intentions and detect potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Arun Jose