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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) demonstrate significant reasoning capabilities, particularly through long chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, which can be elicited by reinforcement learning (RL). However, prolonged CoT reasoning presents…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Haoyuan Wu , Xueyi Chen , Rui Ming , Jilong Gao , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a promising approach for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. Recently, a series of studies attempt to explain the mechanisms underlying CoT,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Qiguang Chen , Libo Qin , Jiaqi Wang , Jinxuan Zhou , Wanxiang Che

Recent studies have shown that making a model spend more time thinking through longer Chain of Thoughts (CoTs) enables it to gain significant improvements in complex reasoning tasks. While current researches continue to explore the benefits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Wenkai Yang , Shuming Ma , Yankai Lin , Furu Wei

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting improves LLM reasoning but incurs high latency and memory cost due to verbose traces, motivating CoT compression with preserved correctness. Existing methods either shorten CoTs at the semantic level, which…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhenxuan Fan , Jie Cao , Yang Dai , Zheqi Lv , Wenqiao Zhang , Zhongle Xie , Peng LU , Beng Chin Ooi

In this paper, we introduce Concise Chain-of-Thought (CCoT) prompting. We compared standard CoT and CCoT prompts to see how conciseness impacts response length and correct-answer accuracy. We evaluated this using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 with a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Matthew Renze , Erhan Guven

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one of the most promising tools we have for detecting model misbehavior, but its effectiveness depends on models faithfully externalizing their reasoning. Motivated by this vulnerability, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Reilly Haskins , Bilal Chughtai , Joshua Engels

Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision can substantially improve transformer performance, yet the mechanisms by which models learn to follow and benefit from CoT remain poorly understood. We investigate these learning dynamics through the lens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Zihan Pengmei , Costas Mavromatis , Zhengyuan Shen , Yunyi Zhang , Vassilis N. Ioannidis , Huzefa Rangwala

Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models' (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Soochan Lee , Gunhee Kim

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant accuracy degradation due to insufficient reasoning ability when dealing with complex and abstract tasks. Thought structures such as Chain of Thought (CoT) and Tree of Thought (ToT) focus on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Fengxiao Tang , Yufeng Li , Zongzong Wu , Ming Zhao

The chain-of-though (CoT) prompting methods were successful in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks thanks to their ability to unveil the underlying complex reasoning processes. Such reasoning processes typically exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Ziqi Jin , Wei Lu

We present the surprising finding that a language model's reasoning capabilities can be improved by training on synthetic datasets of chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from more capable models, even when all of those traces lead to an incorrect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Abhranil Chandra , Ayush Agrawal , Arian Hosseini , Sebastian Fischmeister , Rishabh Agarwal , Navin Goyal , Aaron Courville

Chain-of-Though (CoT) represents a common strategy for reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) by decomposing complex tasks into intermediate inference steps. However, explanations generated via CoT are susceptible to content biases that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Leonardo Ranaldi , Marco Valentino , Andrè Freitas

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising performance but compromise token efficiency due to verbose reasoning processes. Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) posits that complex problems can be solved more efficiently through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ruihan Gong , Yue Liu , Wenjie Qu , Mingzhe Du , Yufei He , Yingwei Ma , Yulin Chen , Xiang Liu , Yi Wen , Xinfeng Li , Ruidong Wang , Xinzhong Zhu , Bryan Hooi , Jiaheng Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves multi-step mathematical problem solving in large language models but remains vulnerable to exposure bias and error accumulation, as early mistakes propagate irreversibly through autoregressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Shidong Cao , Hongzhan Lin , Yuxuan Gu , Ziyang Luo , Jing Ma

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring has been proposed as a promising safety mechanism for detecting misaligned behavior in large language models. However, its reliability remains largely unexplored beyond English and across diverse model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Eric Onyame , Runtao Zhou , Kowshik Thopalli , Bhavya Kailkhura , Chirag Agarwal

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often suffer from overthinking, generating verbose reasoning traces that compromise both computational efficiency and interpretability. Unlike prior efforts that rely on global length-based rewards, we propose…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jialiang Hong , Taihang Zhen , Kai Chen , Jiaheng Liu , Junlan Feng , Wenpeng Zhu , Jing Huo , Yang Gao , Depeng Wang , Haitao Wan , Xi Yang , Boyan Wang , Fanyu Meng , Yuyao Zhang

We develop a learning-theoretic framework for understanding Chain of Thought (CoT). We model CoT as the interaction between an answer map and a chain rule that generates intermediate questions autoregressively, and define the reasoning risk…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Yue Zhang , Zhiyi Dong , Tommaso Cesari , Yongyi Mao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique has proven effective in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, the performance gains are inconsistent across different tasks, and the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Peijie Liu , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a method that enables language models to handle complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler steps. Despite its success, the underlying mechanics of CoT are not yet fully understood. In an attempt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Yingcong Li , Kartik Sreenivasan , Angeliki Giannou , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak