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Related papers: Data Shifts Hurt CoT: A Theoretical Study

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This work provides the first theoretical analysis of training transformers to solve complex problems by recursively generating intermediate states, analogous to fine-tuning for chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. We consider training a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-12 Juno Kim , Taiji Suzuki

Recent studies have discovered that Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) can dramatically improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when dealing with complex tasks involving mathematics or reasoning. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guhao Feng , Bohang Zhang , Yuntian Gu , Haotian Ye , Di He , Liwei Wang

Instructing the model to generate a sequence of intermediate steps, a.k.a., a chain of thought (CoT), is a highly effective method to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on arithmetics and symbolic reasoning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zhiyuan Li , Hong Liu , Denny Zhou , Tengyu Ma

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing large language models' capabilities by generating intermediate reasoning steps for complex tasks. A common practice for equipping LLMs with reasoning is to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Harsh Chaudhari , Ethan Rathbun , Hanna Foerster , Jamie Hayes , Matthew Jagielski , Milad Nasr , Ilia Shumailov , Alina Oprea

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

This report examines the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in improving the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by previous studies \cite{Min2022RethinkingWork}, we analyze the impact of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Aayush Mishra , Karan Thakkar

Generalization to novel compound tasks under distribution shift is important for deploying transformer-based language models (LMs). This work investigates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning as a means to enhance OOD generalization. Through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ru Wang , Wei Huang , Selena Song , Haoyu Zhang , Qian Niu , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo , Jiaxian Guo

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning performance of large language models (LLM). While current theoretical studies often attribute this improvement to increased expressiveness and computational capacity, we argue that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-06 Kaiyue Wen , Huaqing Zhang , Hongzhou Lin , Jingzhao Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a foundational technique for eliciting reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the robustness of this approach to corruptions in intermediate reasoning steps remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Ashwath Vaithinathan Aravindan , Mayank Kejriwal

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

It has been shown that the chain of thought (CoT) can enhance the power of large language models (LLMs) to solve certain mathematical reasoning problems. However, the capacity of CoT is still not fully explored. As an important instance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Lijia Yu , Xiao-Shan Gao , Lijun Zhang

Test-time scaling improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by allocating extra compute to generate longer Chains-of-Thoughts (CoTs). This enables models to tackle more complex problem by breaking them down into…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Adel Javanmard , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Vahab Mirrokni

Many language tasks can be modeled as classification problems where a large language model (LLM) is given a prompt and selects one among many possible answers. We show that the classification error in such problems scales as a power law in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-22 Amrut Nadgir , Vijay Balasubramanian , Pratik Chaudhari

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-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. Previous work attempts to evaluate it but falls short in providing an in-depth analysis of patterns that influence the CoT. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Yubo Chen , Jiexin Xu , Huaijun Li , Xiaojian Jiang , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, debates persist about whether LLMs exhibit abstract generalization or rely on shallow heuristics when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Akshara Prabhakar , Thomas L. Griffiths , R. Thomas McCoy

Chain-of-thoughts (CoT) requires large language models (LLMs) to generate intermediate steps before reaching the final answer, and has been proven effective to help LLMs solve complex reasoning tasks. However, the inner mechanism of CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Fangwei Zhu , Peiyi Wang , Zhifang Sui

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting substantially improves the sample efficiency of transformers, reducing the complexity of tasks like parity learning from exponential to polynomial in the input length. However, generating explicit reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yixiao Huang , Hanlin Zhu , Zixuan Wang , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell , Somayeh Sojoudi , Song Mei

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
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