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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in eliciting structured reasoning (i.e., CoT reasoning) from large language models (LLMs). Regardless of its popularity, recent studies expose its failures in some reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Chengshuai Zhao , Zhen Tan , Pingchuan Ma , Dawei Li , Bohan Jiang , Yancheng Wang , Yingzhen Yang , Huan Liu

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to significantly improve the performance of large language models (LLMs), particularly in arithmetic and reasoning tasks, by instructing the model to produce intermediate reasoning steps.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Jianhao Huang , Zixuan Wang , Jason D. Lee

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on code generation, but the mechanisms by which Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical and information-theoretic study of CoT…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Naizhu Jin , Zhong Li , Guang Yang , Tian Zhang , Qingkai Zeng

Few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While theoretical investigations have been conducted to understand CoT, the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Yingqian Cui , Pengfei He , Xianfeng Tang , Qi He , Chen Luo , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been shown to empirically improve Transformers' performance, and theoretically increase their expressivity to Turing completeness. However, whether Transformers can learn to generalize to CoT traces longer than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Oliver Kraus , Yash Sarrof , Yuekun Yao , Alexander Koller , Michael Hahn

Long chain-of-thought (Long-CoT) reasoning models have motivated a growing body of work on compressing reasoning traces to reduce inference cost, yet existing evaluations focus almost exclusively on task accuracy and token savings.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Lingjie Zeng , Xiaofan Chen , Yanbo Wang , Xiuying Chen

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is an efficient prompting method that enables the reasoning ability of large language models by augmenting the query using multiple examples with multiple intermediate steps. Despite the empirical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Hongkang Li , Songtao Lu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xiaodong Cui , Meng Wang

Generating a Chain of Thought (CoT) has been shown to consistently improve large language model (LLM) performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. However, prior work has mainly focused on logical reasoning tasks (e.g. arithmetic, commonsense…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Omar Shaikh , Hongxin Zhang , William Held , Michael Bernstein , Diyi Yang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a de-facto standard technique to elicit reasoning-like responses from large language models (LLMs), allowing them to spell out individual steps before giving a final answer. While the resemblance to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Gregor Bachmann , Yichen Jiang , Seyed Mohsen Moosavi Dezfooli , Moin Nabi

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has become a vital technique for enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), attracting increasing attention from researchers. One stream of approaches focuses on the iterative enhancement of LLMs by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Yongheng Zhang , Qiguang Chen , Jingxuan Zhou , Peng Wang , Jiasheng Si , Jin Wang , Wenpeng Lu , Libo Qin

Learning complex functions that involve multi-step reasoning poses a significant challenge for standard supervised learning from input-output examples. Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision, which provides intermediate reasoning steps together…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-23 Awni Altabaa , Omar Montasser , John Lafferty

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Looped Transformers have been shown to empirically improve performance on reasoning tasks and to theoretically enhance expressivity by recursively increasing the number of computational steps. However, their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Kevin Xu , Issei Sato

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being applied to clinical care, a domain where both accuracy and transparent reasoning are critical for safe and trustworthy deployment. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which elicits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Jiageng Wu , Kevin Xie , Bowen Gu , Nils Krüger , Kueiyu Joshua Lin , Jie Yang

Explanations are often promoted as tools for transparency, but they can also foster confirmation bias; users may assume reasoning is correct whenever outputs appear acceptable. We study this double-edged role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Eunkyu Park , Wesley Hanwen Deng , Vasudha Varadarajan , Mingxi Yan , Gunhee Kim , Maarten Sap , Motahhare Eslami

Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs) but leads to substantial inference overhead, limiting deployment in resource-constrained settings. This paper investigates efficient CoT…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ziqian Bi , Kaijie Chen , Tianyang Wang , Junfeng Hao , Benji Peng , Xinyuan Song

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the theoretical foundations of learning from CoT data remain underdeveloped, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Shai Shalev-Shwartz , Amnon Shashua

The performance of modern language models (LMs) has been improved by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, i.e., the process of generating intermediate results that guide the model towards a final answer. A possible explanation for this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Franz Nowak , Anej Svete , Alexandra Butoi , Ryan Cotterell

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision has become a common strategy to enhance reasoning in language models. While effective for large models, we identify a phenomenon we call Long CoT Degradation, in which small language models (SLMs;…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Renjie Luo , Jiaxi Li , Chen Huang , Wei Lu

Chain-of-thought emerges as a promising technique for eliciting reasoning capabilities from Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it does not always improve task performance or accurately represent reasoning processes, leaving unresolved…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Guangsheng Bao , Hongbo Zhang , Cunxiang Wang , Linyi Yang , Yue Zhang