English
Related papers

Related papers: Latent Chain-of-Thought? Decoding the Depth-Recurr…

200 papers

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Tianqiao Liu , Zui Chen , Zitao Liu , Mi Tian , Weiqi Luo

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, most existing approaches focus on hard token decoding, which constrains reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yige Xu , Xu Guo , Zhiwei Zeng , Chunyan Miao

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

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods offer a token-efficient alternative to explicit CoT reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but a persistent performance gap has limited their adoption. We identify a core latent instability issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Xilin Wei , Xiaoran Liu , Yuhang Zang , Xiaoyi Dong , Yuhang Cao , Jiaqi Wang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

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

Latent or continuous chain-of-thought methods replace explicit textual rationales with a number of internal latent steps, but these intermediate computations are difficult to evaluate beyond correlation-based probes. In this paper, we view…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zirui Li , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yizhi Li , Jian Yang , Chenghua Lin , Min Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting substantially improves the sample efficiency of transformers, reducing the complexity of tasks like parity learning from exponential to polynomial in the input length. However, generating explicit reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yixiao Huang , Hanlin Zhu , Zixuan Wang , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell , Somayeh Sojoudi , Song Mei

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zongqian Wu , Baoduo Xu , Ruochen Cui , Mengmeng Zhan , Xiaofeng Zhu , Lei Feng

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning typically utilizes the discrete language space for thinking, which is inherently inefficient, as many generated tokens only enforce linguistic rules that are not required for reasoning. To bypass this,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Enes Özeren , Matthias Aßenmacher

Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Michael Rizvi-Martel , Guillaume Rabusseau , Marius Mosbach

Reasoning-oriented Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on generating explicit tokens step by step, and their effectiveness typically hinges on large-scale supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Haoyu Zheng , Zhuonan Wang , Yuqian Yuan , Tianwei Lin , Wenqiao Zhang , Zheqi Lv , Juncheng Li , Siliang Tang , Yueting Zhuang , Hongyang He

While explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) equips Large Language Models (LLMs) with strong reasoning capabilities, it requires models to verbalize every intermediate step in text tokens, constraining the model thoughts to the discrete vocabulary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Weihao Liu , Dehai Min , Lu Cheng

Large language models (LLMs) are typically constrained to reason in the language space, where they express the reasoning process through a chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve complex problems. However, the language space may not always be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Shibo Hao , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , DiJia Su , Xian Li , Zhiting Hu , Jason Weston , Yuandong Tian

Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision can substantially improve transformer performance, yet the mechanisms by which models learn to follow and benefit from CoT remain poorly understood. We investigate these learning dynamics through the lens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Zihan Pengmei , Costas Mavromatis , Zhengyuan Shen , Yunyi Zhang , Vassilis N. Ioannidis , Huzefa Rangwala

Explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning substantially improves the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), but incurs high inference cost due to lengthy autoregressive traces. Existing latent reasoning methods offer a promising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Hui Xie , Jie Liu , Ziyue Qiao , Joaquin Vanschore

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces promise transparency for reasoning language models, but prior work shows they are not always faithful reflections of internal computation. This raises challenges for oversight: practitioners may misinterpret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jiazheng Li , Andreas Damianou , J Rosser , José Luis Redondo García , Konstantina Palla

Language Models (LMs) emit Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) that drive much of their capability. However, the same sequence that carries useful reasoning can also covertly convey messages: a misaligned model may embed covert information in its CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhejian Zhou , Jonathan May

Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting have enabled large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning. However, the explainability of such reasoning remains limited, with prior work primarily focusing on local…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Sheldon Yu , Yuxin Xiong , Junda Wu , Xintong Li , Tong Yu , Xiang Chen , Ritwik Sinha , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley

Most efforts to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) involve either scaling the number of parameters and the size of training data, or scaling inference computation by letting models generate complex chains of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yeskendir Koishekenov , Aldo Lipani , Nicola Cancedda