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Generating a Chain of Thought (CoT) has been shown to consistently improve large language model (LLM) performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. However, prior work has mainly focused on logical reasoning tasks (e.g. arithmetic, commonsense…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Omar Shaikh , Hongxin Zhang , William Held , Michael Bernstein , Diyi Yang

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to benefit from chain-of-thought (COT) prompting, particularly when tackling tasks that require systematic reasoning processes. On the other hand, COT prompting also poses new vulnerabilities in the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-01-24 Zhen Xiang , Fengqing Jiang , Zidi Xiong , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran , Bo Li

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

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Lennart Meincke , Ethan Mollick , Lilach Mollick , Dan Shapiro

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used to elicit explicit reasoning from large language models for code (LLM4Code). However, its impact on robustness and the stability of reasoning trajectories under realistic input perturbations…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yang Liu , Da Song , Armstrong Foundjem , Heng Li , Foutse Khomh

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

Detecting harmful AI actions is important as AI agents gain adoption. Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one method widely used to detect adversarial attacks and AI misalignment. However, attackers and misaligned models might evade CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Shiyuan Guo , Henry Sleight , Fabien Roger

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is often viewed as a window into LLM decision-making, yet recent work suggests it may function merely as post-hoc rationalization. This raises a critical alignment question: Does the reasoning trace causally shape…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Pengcheng Wen , Yanxu Zhu , Jiapeng Sun , Han Zhu , Yujin Zhou , Chi-Min Chan , Sirui Han , Yike Guo

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) holds a significant place in augmenting the reasoning performance for large language models (LLMs). While some studies focus on improving CoT accuracy through methods like retrieval enhancement, yet a rigorous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Lijie Hu , Liang Liu , Shu Yang , Xin Chen , Hongru Xiao , Mengdi Li , Pan Zhou , Muhammad Asif Ali , Di Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit \textit{hallucinations}, generating factually incorrect or semantically irrelevant content in response to prompts. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can mitigate hallucinations by encouraging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Jiahao Cheng , Tiancheng Su , Jia Yuan , Guoxiu He , Jiawei Liu , Xinqi Tao , Jingwen Xie , Huaxia Li

Large language models, despite extensive alignment with human values and ethical principles, remain vulnerable to sophisticated jailbreak attacks that exploit their reasoning abilities. Existing safety measures often detect overt malicious…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Rachneet Sachdeva , Rima Hazra , Iryna Gurevych

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Looped Transformers have been shown to empirically improve performance on reasoning tasks and to theoretically enhance expressivity by recursively increasing the number of computational steps. However, their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Kevin Xu , Issei Sato

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

Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has delivered success on complex reasoning tasks, which aims at designing a simple prompt like ``Let's think step by step'' or multiple in-context exemplars with well-designed rationales to elicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jianing Wang , Qiushi Sun , Xiang Li , Ming Gao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a step-wise and coherent reasoning chain, shows its impressive strength when used as a prompting strategy for large language models (LLM). Recent years, the prominent effect of CoT prompting has attracted emerging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Zihan Yu , Liang He , Zhen Wu , Xinyu Dai , Jiajun Chen

Alignment techniques often inadvertently induce sycophancy in LLMs. While prior studies studied this behaviour in direct-answer settings, the role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning remains under-explored: does it serve as a logical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Zhaoxin Feng , Zheng Chen , Jianfei Ma , Yip Tin Po , Emmanuele Chersoni , Bo Li

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used inference-time technique for improving reasoning, yet its gains are uneven across tasks. We analyze when and why CoT helps by modeling the step-wise reasoning trajectory as a Markov chain.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zihan Wang , Yijun Dong , Qi Lei

Recent large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by generating detailed chain-of-thought traces, but this often leads to excessive token use and high inference latency. Existing efficiency approaches typically focus on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Lukas Struppek , Dominik Hintersdorf , Hannah Struppek , Daniel Neider , Kristian Kersting

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become a widely used strategy for improving large language and multimodal model performance. However, it is still an open question under which settings CoT systematically reduces performance. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Ryan Liu , Jiayi Geng , Addison J. Wu , Ilia Sucholutsky , Tania Lombrozo , Thomas L. Griffiths