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Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning but can still exhibit harmful behaviors. Current alignment strategies typically embed safety into model weights, making these controls implicit, static, and difficult to modify. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Xuanming Zhang , Yuxuan Chen , Samuel Yeh , Sharon Li

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been shown to significantly improve the reasoning accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on complex tasks. However, due to the autoregressive, step-by-step generation paradigm, existing CoT methods suffer from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jiaquan Zhang , Chaoning Zhang , Shuxu Chen , Xudong Wang , Zhenzhen Huang , Pengcheng Zheng , Shuai Yuan , Sheng Zheng , Qigan Sun , Jie Zou , Lik-Hang Lee , Yang Yang

Large language model (LLM) performance on reasoning problems typically does not generalize out of distribution. Previous work has claimed that this can be mitigated with chain of thought prompting-a method of demonstrating solution…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-13 Kaya Stechly , Karthik Valmeekam , Subbarao Kambhampati

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances large language models (LLMs) by decomposing complex problems into step-by-step solutions, improving performance on reasoning tasks. However, current CoT disclosure policies vary widely across…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Yihang Chen , Haikang Deng , Kaiqiao Han , Qingyue Zhao

Recent studies have shown that making a model spend more time thinking through longer Chain of Thoughts (CoTs) enables it to gain significant improvements in complex reasoning tasks. While current researches continue to explore the benefits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Wenkai Yang , Shuming Ma , Yankai Lin , Furu Wei

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). CoT explicitly encourages the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem, by providing a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Boshi Wang , Sewon Min , Xiang Deng , Jiaming Shen , You Wu , Luke Zettlemoyer , Huan Sun

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become central to mathematical reasoning in large language models, yet models remain brittle to early errors: a single arithmetic slip or unjustified inference typically propagates uncorrected to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Saraswathy Amjith , Mihika Dusad , Neha Muramalla , Shweta Shah

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

Large language models have emerged as powerful tools for general intelligence, showcasing advanced natural language processing capabilities that find applications across diverse domains. Despite their impressive performance, recent studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-01 Elita Lobo , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Reasoning-tuned LLMs utilizing long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) excel at single-answer tasks, yet their ability to model Human Label Variation--which requires capturing probabilistic ambiguity rather than resolving it--remains underexplored. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Beiduo Chen , Tiancheng Hu , Caiqi Zhang , Robert Litschko , Anna Korhonen , Barbara Plank

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been widely adopted to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of CoT reasoning is inconsistent across tasks with different reasoning types. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Yue Wan , Xiaowei Jia , Xiang Lorraine Li

Scaling inference compute enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs), with long chains-of-thought (CoTs) enabling strategies like backtracking and error correction. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial method for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Edward Yeo , Yuxuan Tong , Morry Niu , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

Large language models (LLMs) can effectively handle outdated information through knowledge editing. However, current approaches face two key limitations: (I) Poor generalization: Most approaches rigidly inject new knowledge without ensuring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Jinhu Fu , Yan Bai , Longzhu He , Yihang Lou , Yanxiao Zhao , Li Sun , Sen Su

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on chain-of-thought (CoT) data shows that a small amount of high-quality data can outperform massive datasets. Yet, what constitutes "quality" remains ill-defined. Existing reasoning methods rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Prateek Humane , Paolo Cudrano , Daniel Z. Kaplan , Matteo Matteucci , Supriyo Chakraborty , Irina Rish

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Xiaomin Li , Zhou Yu , Zhiwei Zhang , Xupeng Chen , Ziji Zhang , Yingying Zhuang , Narayanan Sadagopan , Anurag Beniwal

With the rapid advancement of large reasoning models, long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance on complex tasks. However, this often comes with a significant increase in token usage. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Ruiqi Zhang , Changyi Xiao , Yixin Cao

Chain of thought (CoT) fine-tuning aims to endow large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities by training them on curated reasoning traces. It leverages both supervised and reinforced fine-tuning to cultivate human-like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Xiaoshu Chen , Sihang Zhou , Ke Liang , Duanyang Yuan , Haoyuan Chen , Xiaoyu Sun , Lingyuan Meng , Xinwang Liu

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) on long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectories has become a pivotal phase in building large reasoning models. However, how CoT trajectories from different sources influence the generalization performance of models…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Zhaoyi Li , Xiangyu Xi , Zhengyu Chen , Wei Wang , Gangwei Jiang , Ranran Shen , Linqi Song , Ying Wei , Defu Lian

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is often viewed as a window into LLM decision-making, yet recent work suggests it may function merely as post-hoc rationalization. This raises a critical alignment question: Does the reasoning trace causally shape…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Pengcheng Wen , Yanxu Zhu , Jiapeng Sun , Han Zhu , Yujin Zhou , Chi-Min Chan , Sirui Han , Yike Guo

When a language model sees a document contradicting its training knowledge, it must choose: follow the document or trust itself. Prior work proved this choice depends on how well-known the fact is. We ask: does the model's chain-of-thought…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Pruthvinath Jeripity Venkata