Related papers: Thought Anchors: Which LLM Reasoning Steps Matter?

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (LLMs) explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps prior to generating final answers, helping the model excel in complex problem-solving. In this paper, we demonstrate that this emerging…

Large language models (LLMs) possess strong semantic understanding, driving significant progress in data mining applications. This is further enhanced by large reasoning models (LRMs), which provide explicit multi-step reasoning traces. On…

Reasoning is a cognitive process of using evidence to reach a sound conclusion. The reasoning capability is essential for large language models (LLMs) to serve as the brain of the artificial general intelligence agent. Recent studies reveal…

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Numerous applications of large language models (LLMs) rely on their ability to perform step-by-step reasoning. However, the reasoning behavior of LLMs remains poorly understood, posing challenges to research, development, and safety. To…

We introduce seqBench, a parametrized benchmark for probing sequential reasoning limits in Large Language Models (LLMs) through precise, multi-dimensional control over several key complexity dimensions. seqBench allows systematic variation…

The prevailing approach to distilling reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs)-behavioral cloning from textual rationales-is fundamentally limited. It teaches Small Language Models (SLMs) to mimic surface-level patterns rather than the…

Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with multi-step logical reasoning. Existing approaches either purely refine the reasoning chain in natural language form or attach a symbolic solver as an external module. In this work, we instead…

Modern reasoning language models generate dense, sequential chain-of-thought traces implicitly assuming that every token contributes and that steps must be consumed in order. We challenge both assumptions through a systematic intervention…

Structured reasoning can improve the inference performance of large language models (LLMs), but it also introduces computational cost and control constraints. When additional reasoning structure helps, and when it instead reduces efficiency…

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) leverage transparent reasoning traces, known as Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs), to break down complex problems into intermediate steps and derive final answers. However, these reasoning traces introduce unique safety…

The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such…

The deployment of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) in high-stakes decision-making pipelines has introduced a novel and opaque attack surface: reasoning backdoors. In these attacks, the model's intermediate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is manipulated…

Large language models increasingly rely on explicit chain-of-thought reasoning to solve complex tasks, yet the safety of the reasoning process itself remains largely unaddressed. Existing work focuses predominantly on content safety (i.e.,…

Reasoning-oriented large language models (RLMs) achieve strong gains on tasks such as mathematics and coding by generating explicit intermediate reasoning. However, their impact on machine translation (MT) remains underexplored. We…

The existing methods for evaluating the inference abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been predominantly results-centric, making it challenging to assess the inference process comprehensively. We introduce a novel approach using…

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in large language models' (LLMs) reasoning, which is largely due to the chain-of-thought (CoT) approaches, allowing models to generate intermediate reasoning steps before reaching the final…

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly focused on "reasoning" ability, a concept with many overlapping definitions in the LLM discourse. We take a more structured approach, distinguishing meta-level reasoning…

While large language models (LLMs) excel in mathematical and code reasoning, we observe they struggle with social reasoning tasks, exhibiting cognitive confusion, logical inconsistencies, and conflation between objective world states and…

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a training…