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Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) has become a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs); however, the performance gains often come with a substantial increase in reasoning budget. Recent studies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jie Cao , Tianwei Lin , Zhenxuan Fan , Bo Yuan , Ziyuan Zhao , Rolan Yan , Wenqiao Zhang , Siliang Tang

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant accuracy degradation due to insufficient reasoning ability when dealing with complex and abstract tasks. Thought structures such as Chain of Thought (CoT) and Tree of Thought (ToT) focus on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Fengxiao Tang , Yufeng Li , Zongzong Wu , Ming Zhao

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces have been shown to improve performance of large language models on a plethora of reasoning tasks, yet there is no consensus on the mechanism by which this boost is achieved. To shed more light on this, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Soumadeep Saha , Akshay Chaturvedi , Saptarshi Saha , Utpal Garain , Nicholas Asher

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts large language models' (LLMs) performance on complex tasks but faces two key limitations: a lack of reliability when solely relying on LLM-generated reasoning chains and lower reasoning performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Feiyang Li , Peng Fang , Zhan Shi , Arijit Khan , Fang Wang , Weihao Wang , Xin Zhang , Yongjian Cui

Does Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning genuinely improve Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, or does it merely add overhead? Existing CoT-VLA systems report limited and inconsistent gains, yet no prior work has rigorously diagnosed when and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Cheng Yin , Yankai Lin , Wang Xu , Sikyuen Tam , Xiangrui Zeng , Zhiyuan Liu , Zhouping Yin

Large language models can generate long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet prior work suggests that CoT can be post-hoc rationalization rather than a faithful reflection of the computation through explicitly designed settings. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Jiachen Zhao , Yiyou Sun , Weiyan Shi , Dawn Song

Learning to reason and carefully explain arguments is central to students' cognitive, mathematical, and computational thinking development. This is particularly challenging in problems under uncertainty and in Bayesian reasoning. With the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Roberto Araya

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can effectively elicit complex multi-step reasoning from Large Language Models~(LLMs). For example, by simply adding CoT instruction ``Let's think step-by-step'' to each input query of MultiArith dataset,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Jiuhai Chen , Lichang Chen , Heng Huang , Tianyi Zhou

Recent impressive results from large reasoning models have been interpreted as a triumph of Chain of Thought (CoT), and especially of the process of training on CoTs sampled from base LLMs in order to help find new reasoning patterns. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Karthik Valmeekam , Vardhan Palod , Kaya Stechly , Atharva Gundawar , Subbarao Kambhampati

Generating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) before deriving the answer can effectively improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and significantly improve the accuracy of the generated answer. However, in most cases, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Yu Kang , Xianghui Sun , Liangyu Chen , Wei Zou

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is as important as predictive accuracy. Extended reasoning via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Robert Welch , Emir Konuk , Kevin Smith

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities in solving mathematical reasoning tasks, leveraging Chain-of-Thought (CoT) data as a vital component in guiding answer generation. Current paradigms typically generate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Honglin Lin , Zhuoshi Pan , Yu Li , Qizhi Pei , Xin Gao , Mengzhang Cai , Conghui He , Lijun Wu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has unlocked advanced reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with intermediate steps, yet incurs prohibitive computational costs due to generation of extra tokens. Recent studies empirically show that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Juncai Li , Ru Li , Yuxiang Zhou , Boxiang Ma , Jeff Z. Pan

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) holds a significant place in augmenting the reasoning performance for large language models (LLMs). While some studies focus on improving CoT accuracy through methods like retrieval enhancement, yet a rigorous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Lijie Hu , Liang Liu , Shu Yang , Xin Chen , Hongru Xiao , Mengdi Li , Pan Zhou , Muhammad Asif Ali , Di Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving large language model performance on complex tasks, but recent work shows that reasoning steps often fail to causally influence the final answer, creating brittle…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored. We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yanjie He

Recent advances in Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but have also introduced their computational efficiency as a new attack surface. In this paper, we…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-17 Shuaitong Liu , Renjue Li , Lijia Yu , Lijun Zhang , Zhiming Liu , Gaojie Jin

Chain-of-thought (COT) prompting can help large language models (LLMs) reason toward correct answers, but its efficacy in reasoning toward incorrect answers is unexplored. This process of elimination (PoE), when used with COT, can enhance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-11 Nishant Balepur , Shramay Palta , Rachel Rudinger

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve state-of-the-art performance across various NLP tasks but face deployment challenges due to high computational costs and memory constraints. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Anh Duc Le , Tu Vu , Nam Le Hai , Nguyen Thi Ngoc Diep , Linh Ngo Van , Trung Le , Thien Huu Nguyen