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While large language models (LLMs) excel in mathematical and code reasoning, we observe they struggle with social reasoning tasks, exhibiting cognitive confusion, logical inconsistencies, and conflation between objective world states and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jialu Du , Guiyang Hou , Yihui Fu , Chen Wu , Wenqi Zhang , Yongliang Shen , Weiming Lu

Activation steering methods enable inference-time control of large language model (LLM) behavior without retraining, but current approaches face a fundamental trade-off: sample-efficient methods suboptimally capture steering signals from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Kartik Sharma , Rakshit S. Trivedi

Despite the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across diverse tasks, the internal mechanisms governing how they encode and ground distinct visual concepts remain poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we propose…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Zehao Deng , Tianjie Ju , Zheng Wu , Liangbo He , Jun Lan , Huijia Zhu , Weiqiang Wang , Zhuosheng Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning, yet their efficiency is limited by the surging cognitive overhead of long thought traces. In this paper, we propose LightThinker, a method that enables LLMs to dynamically compress…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yuqi Zhu , Jintian Zhang , Zhenjie Wan , Yujie Luo , Shuofei Qiao , Zhengke Gui , Da Zheng , Lei Liang , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are increasingly integrated into systems requiring reliable multi-step inference, yet this growing dependence exposes new vulnerabilities related to computational availability. In particular, LRMs exhibit a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Shuqiang Wang , Wei Cao , Jiaqi Weng , Jialing Tao , Licheng Pan , Hui Xue , Zhixuan Chu

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities on complex tasks, exhibiting emergent, human-like thinking patterns. Despite their advances, we identify a fundamental limitation: current LRMs lack a dedicated meta-level…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Haonan Dong , Haoran Ye , Wenhao Zhu , Kehan Jiang , Guojie Song

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable progress by leveraging Reinforcement Learning and extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) techniques. However, the challenge of performing efficient language reasoning--especially…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Zhong-Zhi Li , Xiao Liang , Zihao Tang , Lei Ji , Peijie Wang , Haotian Xu , Xing W , Haizhen Huang , Weiwei Deng , Yeyun Gong , Zhijiang Guo , Xiao Liu , Fei Yin , Cheng-Lin Liu

The inherent capabilities of a language model (LM) and the reasoning strategies it employs jointly determine its performance in reasoning tasks. While test-time scaling is regarded as an effective approach to tackling complex reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zhihong Pan , Kai Zhang , Yuze Zhao , Yupeng Han

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps. However, excessive or redundant reasoning -- so-called overthinking -- can increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Renliang Sun , Wei Cheng , Dawei Li , Haifeng Chen , Wei Wang

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has focused on test-time scaling to improve reasoning via increased inference computation, but often at the cost of efficiency. We revisit test-time behavior and uncover a simple yet…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zhen Yang , Mingyang Zhang , Feng Chen , Ganggui Ding , Liang Hou , Xin Tao , Ying-Cong Chen

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often reach a correct solution before their long Chain-of-Thought trace ends, yet continue with redundant verification, repeated attempts, or unnecessary exploration that wastes computation and can even…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Xinyan Wang , Xiaogeng Liu , Chaowei Xiao

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architectures within Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have achieved impressive reasoning capabilities by selectively activating experts to facilitate structured cognitive processes. Despite notable advances, existing…

When language model agents tackle complex software engineering tasks, they often degrade over long trajectories, which we define as *agent drift*. We focus on two recurring failure modes *overthinking* and *overacting*, i.e., where the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Yuan Sui , Yulin Chen , Yibo Li , Xue Jiang , Yufei He , Yihong Dong , Xiaoxin He , Tianyu Gao , Bryan Hooi

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning when they include intermediate steps, known as "chains of thought" (CoTs). However, these rationales are often overly verbose, even for simple problems, leading to wasted context,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Seyedarmin Azizi , Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo , Massoud Pedram

Latent space steering methods provide a practical approach to controlling large language models by applying steering vectors to intermediate activations, guiding outputs toward desired behaviors while avoiding retraining. Despite their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Shawn Im , Sharon Li

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved impressive performance in complex tasks, often outperforming conventional large language models (LLMs). However, the prevalent issue of overthinking severely limits their computational efficiency.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Zhiyuan Li , Yi Chang , Yuan Wu

Improving the multi-step reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) is a critical yet challenging task. The dominant paradigm, outcome-supervised reinforcement learning (RLVR), rewards only correct final answers, often propagating…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Beining Wang , Weihang Su , Hongtao Tian , Tao Yang , Yujia Zhou , Ting Yao , Qingyao Ai , Yiqun Liu

Test-time compute has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving the performance of large language models (LLMs), where generating multiple outputs or refining individual chains can significantly boost answer accuracy. However, existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Sheng Liu , Tianlang Chen , Pan Lu , Haotian Ye , Yizheng Chen , Lei Xing , James Zou

State-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are powerful problem solvers, but they still occasionally make mistakes. However, adopting AI models in risk-sensitive domains often requires error rates near 0%. To address this gap, we propose collaboration…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-22 Michael J. Zellinger , Matt Thomson

Steering, or direct manipulation of internal activations to guide LLM responses toward specific semantic concepts, is emerging as a promising avenue for both understanding how semantic concepts are stored within LLMs and advancing LLM…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Parmida Davarmanesh , Ashia Wilson , Adityanarayanan Radhakrishnan