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Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated the capacity of large language models to perform complex reasoning through intermediate steps. While effective, current CoT methods face challenges: Zero-shot-CoT can lead to reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Ziqi Jin , Wei Lu

Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Michael Rizvi-Martel , Guillaume Rabusseau , Marius Mosbach

The use of continuous instead of discrete tokens during the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) phase of reasoning LLMs has garnered attention recently, based on the intuition that a continuous mixture of discrete tokens could simulate a superposition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Natasha Butt , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Ismail Labiad , Julia Kempe , Yann Ollivier

Requiring a large language model (LLM) to generate intermediary reasoning steps, known as Chain of Thought (CoT), has been shown to be an effective way of boosting performance. Previous approaches have focused on generating multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Haritz Puerto , Tilek Chubakov , Xiaodan Zhu , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances Large Language Models (LLMs) by encouraging step-by-step reasoning in natural language. However, leveraging a latent continuous space for reasoning may offer benefits in terms of both efficiency and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Zhenyi Shen , Hanqi Yan , Linhai Zhang , Zhanghao Hu , Yali Du , Yulan He

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances large language models (LLMs) by enabling step-by-step problem-solving, yet its extension to Long-CoT introduces substantial computational overhead due to increased token length. Existing compression…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Yibo Wang , Haotian Luo , Huanjin Yao , Tiansheng Huang , Haiying He , Rui Liu , Naiqiang Tan , Jiaxing Huang , Xiaochun Cao , Dacheng Tao , Li Shen

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks, where models need to reason over extensive input contexts to aggregate target information. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Dawei Zhu , Xiyu Wei , Guangxiang Zhao , Wenhao Wu , Haosheng Zou , Junfeng Ran , Xun Wang , Lin Sun , Xiangzheng Zhang , Sujian Li

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

Chain-of-thought and more broadly test-time compute are known to augment the expressive capabilities of language models and have led to major innovations in reasoning. Motivated by this success, this paper explores latent chain-of-thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Carson Dudley , Samet Oymak

Whether intermediate reasoning is computationally useful or merely explanatory depends on whether chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contain task-relevant information. We present a mechanistic causal analysis of CoT on GSM8K using activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Houman Mehrafarin , Amit Parekh , Ioannis Konstas

Do language models make decisions under uncertainty like humans do, and what role does chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning play in the underlying decision process? We introduce an active probabilistic reasoning task that cleanly separates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Gonçalo Guiomar , Elia Torre , Pehuen Moure , Victoria Shavina , Mario Giulianelli , Shih-Chii Liu , Valerio Mante

Eliciting "chain of thought" (CoT) rationales -- sequences of token that convey a "reasoning" process -- has been shown to consistently improve LLM performance on tasks like question answering. More recent efforts have shown that such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Somin Wadhwa , Silvio Amir , Byron C. Wallace

Multi-step reasoning ability of large language models is crucial in tasks such as math and tool utilization. Current researches predominantly focus on enhancing model performance in these multi-step reasoning tasks through fine-tuning with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Yuli Qiu , Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Yuhang Guo

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to move beyond fast System-1 responses and engage in deliberative System-2 reasoning. However, this comes at the cost of significant inefficiency due to verbose…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xiaoqiang Wang , Suyuchen Wang , Yun Zhu , Bang Liu

Scaling language models to larger and deeper sizes has led to significant boosts in performance. Even though the size of these models limits their application in compute-constrained environments, the race to continually develop ever larger…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Matteo Pagliardini , Martin Jaggi

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) for text offer a compelling alternative to traditional autoregressive language models. Parallel generation makes them efficient, but their computational capabilities and the limitations inherent in their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Anej Svete , Ashish Sabharwal

Test-time scaling has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning, yet the limitations of current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation obscures whether performance gains stem from genuine reasoning or mere verbosity. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhizhang Fu , Yuancheng Gu , Chenkai Hu , Hanmeng Liu , Yue Zhang

Inference-time computation has emerged as a promising scaling axis for improving large language model reasoning. However, despite yielding impressive performance, the optimal allocation of inference-time computation remains poorly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Parsa Mirtaheri , Ezra Edelman , Samy Jelassi , Eran Malach , Enric Boix-Adsera

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting plays an indispensable role in endowing large language models (LLMs) with complex reasoning capabilities. However, CoT currently faces two fundamental challenges: (1) Sufficiency, which ensures that the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xiangning Yu , Zhuohan Wang , Linyi Yang , Haoxuan Li , Anjie Liu , Xiao Xue , Jun Wang , Mengyue Yang

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