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Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been proposed as a way of assisting LLMs in performing complex reasoning. However, developing effective prompts can be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Yuxin Tang

Integrating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into Semantic ID-based recommendation foundation models (such as OpenOneRec) often paradoxically degrades recommendation performance. We identify the root cause as textual inertia from the…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Luankang Zhang , Yonghao Huang , Hang Lv , Mingjia Yin , Liangyue Li , Zulong Chen , Hao Wang , Enhong Chen

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enhances performance of large language models, but questions remain about whether these reasoning traces faithfully reflect the internal processes of the model. We present the first comprehensive study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Sriram Balasubramanian , Samyadeep Basu , Soheil Feizi

A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes. We revisit this claim for reasoning SFT with long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision and find that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Qihan Ren , Peng Wang , Ruikun Cai , Shuai Shao , Dadi Guo , Yuejin Xie , Yafu Li , Quanshi Zhang , Xia Hu , Jing Shao , Dongrui Liu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly rely on step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to improve task performance, particularly in high-resource languages such as English. While recent work has examined final-answer accuracy in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Raoyuan Zhao , Yihong Liu , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

The use of continuous instead of discrete tokens during the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) phase of reasoning LLMs has garnered attention recently, based on the intuition that a continuous mixture of discrete tokens could simulate a superposition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Natasha Butt , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Ismail Labiad , Julia Kempe , Yann Ollivier

Recent work, using the Biasing Features metric, labels a CoT as unfaithful if it omits a prompt-injected hint that affected the prediction. We argue this metric adopts a narrow notion of faithfulness and confuses unfaithfulness with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Kerem Zaman , Shashank Srivastava

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive settings despite substantial documentation that they encode gender biases. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been proposed as a bias-mitigation approach.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Edie Pearman , Sophia Osborne , Mira Kandlikar-Bloch , Mina Arzaghi , Florian Carichon , Golnoosh Farnadi

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a simple and effective method for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The basic idea of CoT is to let LLMs break down their thought processes step-by-step by putting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Yoonjeong Park , Hyunjin Kim , Chanyeol Choi , Junseong Kim , Jy-yong Sohn

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing language model's reasoning capabilities. However, generating long and correct CoT trajectories is challenging. Recent studies have demonstrated that Looped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Qifan Yu , Zhenyu He , Sijie Li , Xun Zhou , Jun Zhang , Jingjing Xu , Di He

The honesty of large language models (LLMs) is a critical alignment challenge, especially as advanced systems with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning may strategically deceive humans. Unlike traditional honesty issues on LLMs, which could be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Kai Wang , Yihao Zhang , Meng Sun

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proposed as a transparency mechanism for large language models in safety-critical deployments, yet its effectiveness depends on faithfulness (whether models accurately verbalize the factors that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Richard J. Young

Large reasoning models (LRMs) spend substantial test-time compute on long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, but what *characterizes* an effective CoT remains unclear. While prior work reports gains from lengthening CoTs and increasing review…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Yunzhen Feng , Julia Kempe , Cheng Zhang , Parag Jain , Anthony Hartshorn

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful technique for improving the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs), particularly for tasks requiring multi-step reasoning. However, recent studies show that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Hadi Mohammadi , Tamas Kozak , Anastasia Giachanou

We study learning with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) supervision from multiple thinkers, all of whom provide correct but possibly systematically different solutions, e.g., step-by-step solutions to math problems written by different thinkers, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Nirmit Joshi , Roey Magen , Nathan Srebro , Nikolaos Tsilivis , Gal Vardi

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly advanced state-of-the-art AI capabilities. However, recent studies have shown that CoT reasoning is not always faithful when models face an explicit bias in their prompts, i.e., the CoT can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-18 Iván Arcuschin , Jett Janiak , Robert Krzyzanowski , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Neel Nanda , Arthur Conmy

Transformer-based approaches have been successfully used to obtain state-of-the-art accuracy on natural language processing (NLP) tasks with semi-structured tables. These model architectures are typically deep, resulting in slow training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-02 Syrine Krichene , Thomas Müller , Julian Martin Eisenschlos

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting boosts Large Language Models accuracy on multi-step tasks, yet whether the generated "thoughts" reflect the true internal reasoning process is unresolved. We present the first feature-level causal study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Xi Chen , Aske Plaat , Niki van Stein

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities across various language tasks, but solving complex reasoning problems remains a significant challenge. While existing methods, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Zhenni Bi , Kai Han , Chuanjian Liu , Yehui Tang , Yunhe Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used method to improve the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). More recently, CoT has been leveraged in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to transfer reasoning capability from a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Cong-Thanh Do , Rama Doddipatla , Kate Knill