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Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Vinay Sharma , Manish Jain

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) leverage transparent reasoning traces, known as Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs), to break down complex problems into intermediate steps and derive final answers. However, these reasoning traces introduce unique safety…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Changyi Li , Jiayi Wang , Xudong Pan , Geng Hong , Min Yang

Step-by-step reasoning is widely used to enhance the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in complex problems. Evaluating the quality of reasoning traces is crucial for understanding and improving LLM reasoning. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Jinu Lee , Julia Hockenmaier

Recent advances in reasoning with large language models (LLMs) have popularized Long Chain-of-Thought (LCoT), a strategy that encourages deliberate and step-by-step reasoning before producing a final answer. While LCoTs have enabled…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Gangwei Jiang , Yahui Liu , Zhaoyi Li , Qi Wang , Fuzheng Zhang , Linqi Song , Ying Wei , Defu Lian

Prompting-based large language models (LLMs) are surprisingly powerful at generating natural language reasoning steps or Chains-of-Thoughts (CoT) for multi-step question answering (QA). They struggle, however, when the necessary knowledge…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-26 Harsh Trivedi , Niranjan Balasubramanian , Tushar Khot , Ashish Sabharwal

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning through intermediate steps in natural language form. Briefly, CoT enables LLMs to think step by step.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Caoyun Fan , Jidong Tian , Yitian Li , Wenqing Chen , Hao He , Yaohui Jin

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

Reasoning-tuned LLMs utilizing long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) excel at single-answer tasks, yet their ability to model Human Label Variation--which requires capturing probabilistic ambiguity rather than resolving it--remains underexplored. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Beiduo Chen , Tiancheng Hu , Caiqi Zhang , Robert Litschko , Anna Korhonen , Barbara Plank

Large language models (LLMs) excel at reasoning tasks but are expensive to deploy. Thus small language models (SLMs) are fine-tuned on CoT data generated by LLMs to copy LLMs' abilities. However, these CoT data may include noisy rationales…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Hongyan Xie , Yitong Yao , Yikun Ban , Zixuan Huang , Deqing Wang , Zhenhe Wu , Haoxiang Su , Chao Wang , Shuangyong Song

Large Reasoning Models like DeepSeek-R1 mark a fundamental shift in how LLMs approach complex problems. Instead of directly producing an answer for a given input, DeepSeek-R1 creates detailed multi-step reasoning chains, seemingly…

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve problem-solving and provide seemingly transparent explanations. However, growing evidence shows that CoT often fail to faithfully represent the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xu Shen , Song Wang , Zhen Tan , Laura Yao , Xinyu Zhao , Kaidi Xu , Xin Wang , Tianlong Chen

Large Language Models (LLMs) employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to deconstruct complex problems. While longer CoTs are often presumed superior, this paper challenges that notion, arguing that longer is not always better. Drawing on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yuyang Wu , Yifei Wang , Ziyu Ye , Tianqi Du , Stefanie Jegelka , Yisen Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing implementations, such as in-context learning and fine-tuning, remain costly and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Li Li , Ziyi Wang , Yongliang Wu , Jianfei Cai , Xu Yang

Uncertainty quantification for LLMs is a key research direction towards addressing hallucination and other issues that limit their reliable deployment. In this work, we show that reasoning trace length is a simple and useful confidence…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Siddartha Devic , Charlotte Peale , Arwen Bradley , Sinead Williamson , Preetum Nakkiran , Aravind Gollakota

While Small Language Models (SLMs) have demonstrated promising performance on an increasingly wide array of commonsense reasoning benchmarks, current evaluation practices rely almost exclusively on the accuracy of their final answers,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Francesco Maria Molfese , Luca Moroni , Ciro Porcaro , Simone Conia , Roberto Navigli

Specialized reasoning language models (RLMs) have demonstrated that scaling test-time computation through detailed reasoning traces significantly enhances performance. Although these traces effectively facilitate knowledge distillation into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Philip Lippmann , Jie Yang

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

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting assumes that generated reasoning reflects a model's internal computation. We show this assumption is wrong in a specific, measurable way: models internally detect their own reasoning errors but outwardly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Aojie Yuan , Zhiyuan Julian Su , Haiyue Zhang , Yi Nian , Yue Zhao

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as raters for evaluation tasks. However, their reliability is often limited for subjective tasks, when human judgments involve subtle reasoning beyond annotation labels. Thinking traces,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Xingjian Zhang , Tianhong Gao , Suliang Jin , Tianhao Wang , Teng Ye , Eytan Adar , Qiaozhu Mei