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Related papers: How do Transformers Learn Implicit Reasoning?

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We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-22 Nicolas Gontier , Koustuv Sinha , Siva Reddy , Christopher Pal

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables reasoning in language models but requires explicit verbalization of intermediate steps. Looped transformers offer an alternative by iteratively refining representations within hidden states. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Markus Frey , Behzad Shomali , Ali Hamza Bashir , David Berghaus , Joachim Koehler , Mehdi Ali

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across diverse tasks, exhibiting emergent properties such as semantic prompt comprehension, In-Context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Despite their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yuling Jiao , Yanming Lai , Huazhen Lin , Wensen Ma , Houduo Qi , Defeng Sun

``Socrates is human. All humans are mortal. Therefore, Socrates is mortal.'' This form of argument illustrates a typical pattern of two-hop reasoning. Formally, two-hop reasoning refers to the process of inferring a conclusion by making two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Tianyu Guo , Hanlin Zhu , Ruiqi Zhang , Jiantao Jiao , Song Mei , Michael I. Jordan , Stuart Russell

The prevailing approach to distilling reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs)-behavioral cloning from textual rationales-is fundamentally limited. It teaches Small Language Models (SLMs) to mimic surface-level patterns rather than the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiangyu Wen , Junhua Huang , Zeju Li , Min Li , Jianyuan Zhong , Zhijian Xu , Mingxuan Yuan , Yongxiang Huang , Qiang Xu

Large language models (LLMs), when guided by explicit textual plans, can perform reliable step-by-step reasoning during problem-solving. However, generating accurate and effective textual plans remains challenging due to LLM hallucinations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-01 Sijia Chen , Di Niu

When performing complex multi-step reasoning tasks, the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to derive structured intermediate proof steps is important for ensuring that the models truly perform the desired reasoning and for improving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Zi'ou Zheng , Christopher Malon , Martin Renqiang Min , Xiaodan Zhu

Large language models often reason beyond surface tokens, but the internal stage at which token-level information becomes abstract relational structure remains unclear. We investigate this question by analyzing how attention heads and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Junjie Zhang , Zhen Shen , Xisong Dong , Gang Xiong

Transformer-based models have demonstrated remarkable reasoning abilities, but the mechanisms underlying relational reasoning remain poorly understood. We investigate how transformers perform \textit{transitive inference}, a classic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Jesse Geerts , Andrew Liu , Stephanie Chan , Claudia Clopath , Kimberly Stachenfeld

Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance by incorporating functional symbolic representations that abstractly describe graph traversal algorithms and step-by-step reasoning in…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Phuong Minh Nguyen , Tien Huu Dang , Naoya Inoue

Reasoning is a core capability of large language models, yet how multi-step reasoning is learned and executed remains unclear. We study this question in a controlled cellular-automata (1dCA) framework that excludes memorisation by using…

Despite superior reasoning prowess demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a lack of understanding prevails around the internal mechanisms of the models that facilitate CoT generation. This work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Subhabrata Dutta , Joykirat Singh , Soumen Chakrabarti , Tanmoy Chakraborty

Integrating free-text explanations to in-context learning of large language models (LLM) is shown to elicit strong reasoning capabilities along with reasonable explanations. In this paper, we consider the problem of leveraging the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Shiyang Li , Jianshu Chen , Yelong Shen , Zhiyu Chen , Xinlu Zhang , Zekun Li , Hong Wang , Jing Qian , Baolin Peng , Yi Mao , Wenhu Chen , Xifeng Yan

Recent advancements in cognitive science and multi-round reasoning techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) suggest that iterative thinking processes improve problem-solving performance in complex tasks. Inspired by this, approaches like…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Chenhui Xu , Dancheng Liu , Jiajie Li , Amir Nassereldine , Zhaohui Li , Jinjun Xiong

Deep Learning architectures, and in particular Transformers, are conventionally viewed as a composition of layers. These layers are actually often obtained as the sum of two contributions: a residual path that copies the input and the…

Large language models have shown remarkable reasoning abilities and scaling laws suggest that large parameter count, especially along the depth axis, is the primary driver. In this work, we make a stronger claim -- many reasoning problems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nikunj Saunshi , Nishanth Dikkala , Zhiyuan Li , Sanjiv Kumar , Sashank J. Reddi

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit a gap between their internal knowledge and their explicit linguistic outputs. In this report, we empirically investigate whether Looped Transformers (LTs)--architectures that increase computational…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Guanxu Chen , Dongrui Liu , Jing Shao

To augment language models with the ability to reason, researchers usually prompt or finetune them to produce chain of thought reasoning steps before producing the final answer. However, although people use natural language to reason…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Yuntian Deng , Kiran Prasad , Roland Fernandez , Paul Smolensky , Vishrav Chaudhary , Stuart Shieber

Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. However, it is unclear whether LMs perform these tasks by cheating with answers memorized from pretraining corpus, or, via a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Yifan Hou , Jiaoda Li , Yu Fei , Alessandro Stolfo , Wangchunshu Zhou , Guangtao Zeng , Antoine Bosselut , Mrinmaya Sachan