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Inductive reasoning is an essential capability for large language models (LLMs) to achieve higher intelligence, which requires the model to generalize rules from observed facts and then apply them to unseen examples. We present MIRAGE, a…

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised…

Reasoning is a key ability for an intelligent system. Large language models (LMs) achieve above-chance performance on abstract reasoning tasks, but exhibit many imperfections. However, human abstract reasoning is also imperfect. For…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strikingly conflicting behaviors: they can appear steadfastly overconfident in their initial answers whilst at the same time being prone to excessive doubt when challenged. To investigate this apparent…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly advanced performance on complex tasks, yet their tendency to overthink introduces inefficiencies. This study investigates the internal mechanisms of reinforcement learning (RL)-trained LRMs…

This paper adopts a cognitive psychology perspective to investigate the recurring mistakes in code resulting from the mental set (Einstellung) effect. The Einstellung effect is the tendency to approach problem-solving with a preconceived…

Reasoning models often generate long traces in which useful self-correction and unproductive revision are hard to distinguish. We study this distinction through backtracking dynamics: local reconsideration, retraction, or re-derivation…

Reasoning models often spend a significant amount of time thinking before they generate a visible response. In the meantime, they do not give the user any hints as to whether their reasoning is on the right track, and do not give the user…

While reasoning in LLMs plays a natural role in math, code generation, and multi-hop factual questions, its effect on simple, single-hop factual questions remains unclear. Such questions do not require step-by-step logical decomposition,…

The Availability bias, manifested in the over-representation of extreme eventualities in decision-making, is a well-known cognitive bias, and is generally taken as evidence of human irrationality. In this work, we present the first…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been used extensively in automatic decision making in a broad variety of scenarios, ranging from credit ratings for loans to recommendations of movies. Traditional design guidelines for AI models focus…

Why do thinking language models like DeepSeek R1 outperform their base counterparts? Despite consistent performance gains, it remains unclear to what extent thinking models learn entirely new reasoning capabilities or repurpose pre-existing…

Reasoning-capable large language models solve hard problems by emitting long chains of thought, paying heavily in latency, GPU time, and energy. Casual inspection of their traces reveals extensive reformulation, verification, and circular…

We investigate whether large language models can introspect on their internal states. It is difficult to answer this question through conversation alone, as genuine introspection cannot be distinguished from confabulations. Here, we address…

Language models are known to absorb biases from their training data, leading to predictions driven by statistical regularities rather than semantic relevance. We investigate the impact of these biases on answer choice preferences in the…

"Overlearning" means that a model trained for a seemingly simple objective implicitly learns to recognize attributes and concepts that are (1) not part of the learning objective, and (2) sensitive from a privacy or bias perspective. For…

With widening deployments of natural language processing (NLP) in daily life, inherited social biases from NLP models have become more severe and problematic. Previous studies have shown that word embeddings trained on human-generated…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored. We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn…

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of thinking language models that generate extensive internal reasoning chains before producing responses. While these models achieve improved performance,…

In human-in-the-loop machine learning, the user provides information beyond that in the training data. Many algorithms and user interfaces have been designed to optimize and facilitate this human--machine interaction; however, fewer studies…