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Related papers: Tokenization Constraints in LLMs: A Study of Symbo…

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Tokenization is a hardcoded compression step which remains in the training pipeline of Large Language Models (LLMs), despite a general trend towards architectures becoming increasingly end-to-end. Prior work has shown promising results at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Sam Dauncey , Roger Wattenhofer

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

Inference-time scaling via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is a major driver of state-of-the-art LLM performance, but it comes with substantial latency and compute costs. We address a fundamental theoretical question: how many reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Kiran Tomlinson , Tobias Schnabel , Adith Swaminathan , Jennifer Neville

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is as important as predictive accuracy. Extended reasoning via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Robert Welch , Emir Konuk , Kevin Smith

Large Language Models (LLMs) perform well on reasoning benchmarks but often fail when inputs alter slightly, raising concerns about the extent to which their success relies on memorization. This issue is especially acute in Chain-of-Thought…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Huihan Li , You Chen , Siyuan Wang , Yixin He , Ninareh Mehrabi , Rahul Gupta , Xiang Ren

Recent studies have discovered that Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) can dramatically improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when dealing with complex tasks involving mathematics or reasoning. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guhao Feng , Bohang Zhang , Yuntian Gu , Haotian Ye , Di He , Liwei Wang

Modern tokenizers employ deterministic algorithms to map text into a single "canonical" token sequence, yet the same string can be encoded as many non-canonical tokenizations using the tokenizer vocabulary. In this work, we investigate the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Brian Siyuan Zheng , Alisa Liu , Orevaoghene Ahia , Jonathan Hayase , Yejin Choi , Noah A. Smith

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has unlocked advanced reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with intermediate steps, yet incurs prohibitive computational costs due to generation of extra tokens. Recent studies empirically show that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Juncai Li , Ru Li , Yuxiang Zhou , Boxiang Ma , Jeff Z. Pan

Large language models (LLMs) can perform reasoning computations both internally within their latent space and externally by generating explicit token sequences like chains of thought. Significant progress in enhancing reasoning abilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Thilo Hagendorff , Sarah Fabi

Chain-of-thought (CoT), tree-of-thought (ToT), and related techniques work surprisingly well in practice for some complex reasoning tasks with Large Language Models (LLMs), but why? This work seeks the underlying reasons by conducting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Liwei Kang , Zirui Zhao , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

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

Large language models (LLMs) have scaled up to unlock a wide range of complex reasoning tasks with the aid of various prompting methods. However, current prompting methods generate natural language intermediate steps to help reasoning,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Yi Hu , Haotong Yang , Zhouchen Lin , Muhan Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, most existing approaches focus on hard token decoding, which constrains reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yige Xu , Xu Guo , Zhiwei Zeng , Chunyan Miao

Language models typically tokenize text into subwords, using a deterministic, hand-engineered heuristic of combining characters into longer surface-level strings such as 'ing' or whole words. Recent literature has repeatedly shown the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Avijit Thawani , Saurabh Ghanekar , Xiaoyuan Zhu , Jay Pujara

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to tackle com- plex multi-step tasks. While base LLMs, pre-trained on general text corpora, often struggle with reasoning due to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Zijian Wang , Yanxiang Ma , Chang Xu

We investigate whether the success of a zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) process can be predicted before completion. We discover that a probing classifier, based on LLM representations, performs well \emph{even before a single token is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Anum Afzal , Florian Matthes , Gal Chechik , Yftah Ziser

Large language models (LLMs) are typically constrained to reason in the language space, where they express the reasoning process through a chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve complex problems. However, the language space may not always be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Shibo Hao , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , DiJia Su , Xian Li , Zhiting Hu , Jason Weston , Yuandong Tian

Variation in language is ubiquitous and often systematically linked to regional, social, and contextual factors. Tokenizers split texts into smaller units and might behave differently for less common linguistic forms. This might affect…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Anna Wegmann , Dong Nguyen , David Jurgens

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, debates persist about whether LLMs exhibit abstract generalization or rely on shallow heuristics when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Akshara Prabhakar , Thomas L. Griffiths , R. Thomas McCoy

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