English
Related papers

Related papers: Where Do Reasoning Models Refuse?

200 papers

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrably enhanced the performance of Large Language Models on tasks requiring multi-step inference. This success has led to widespread claims of emergent reasoning capabilities in these models. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jintian Shao , Yiming Cheng

Reasoning models are evaluated on single-turn benchmarks but deployed in multi-turn dialogue, where users push back on correct answers. Under sustained adversarial pressure we find a previously undocumented failure mode: the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yubo Li , Ramayya Krishnan , Rema Padman

When prompted to think step-by-step, language models (LMs) produce a chain of thought (CoT), a sequence of reasoning steps that the model supposedly used to produce its prediction. Despite much work on CoT prompting, it is unclear if…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Martin Tutek , Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori , Ana Marasović , Yonatan Belinkov

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 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

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting significantly enhances model reasoning, yet its internal mechanisms remain poorly understood. We analyze CoT's operational principles by reversely tracing information flow across decoding, projection, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Hao Yang , Qinghua Zhao , Lei Li , Lingyi Meng , Mengda Yu

Chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) has the potential to improve the explainability of language model reasoning. But CoT can also systematically misrepresent the factors influencing models' behavior -- for example, rationalizing answers in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 James Chua , Edward Rees , Hunar Batra , Samuel R. Bowman , Julian Michael , Ethan Perez , Miles Turpin

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manqing Liu , David Williams-King , Ida Caspary , Linh Le , Hannes Whittingham , Puria Radmard , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young

Large language models can now generate intermediate reasoning steps before producing answers, improving performance on difficult problems by interactively developing solutions. This study uses a content moderation task to examine parallels…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Thomas Davidson

Language models trained to solve reasoning tasks via reinforcement learning have achieved striking results. We refer to these models as reasoning models. Are the Chains of Thought (CoTs) of reasoning models more faithful than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 James Chua , Owain Evans

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs) but often leads to verbose and redundant outputs, thus increasing inference cost. We hypothesize that many reasoning steps are unnecessary for producing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xin Liu , Lu Wang

Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps. Providing these steps for prompting demonstrations is called chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. CoT prompting has two major paradigms. One…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Zhuosheng Zhang , Aston Zhang , Mu Li , Alex Smola

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a critical technique in enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), and latent reasoning methods have been proposed to accelerate the inefficient token-level reasoning chain. We notice that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Fangwei Zhu , Zhifang Sui

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. Previous work attempts to evaluate it but falls short in providing an in-depth analysis of patterns that influence the CoT. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Yubo Chen , Jiexin Xu , Huaijun Li , Xiaojian Jiang , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting reliably improves language-model accuracy, but which properties of a rationale text drive the improvement is poorly understood. Prior work has largely studied generation-time behavior. We instead ask a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xiang Wang , Wei Wei

We provide evidence of performative chain-of-thought (CoT) in reasoning models, where a model becomes strongly confident in its final answer, but continues generating tokens without revealing its internal belief. Our analysis compares…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Siddharth Boppana , Annabel Ma , Max Loeffler , Raphael Sarfati , Eric Bigelow , Atticus Geiger , Owen Lewis , Jack Merullo

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is widely used to elicit explicit reasoning from large language models for code (LLM4Code). However, its impact on robustness and the stability of reasoning trajectories under realistic input perturbations…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Yang Liu , Da Song , Armstrong Foundjem , Heng Li , Foutse Khomh

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicited via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) practices. However, whether fundamental reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Xingwei Tan , Marco Valentino , Mahmud Elahi Akhter , Yuxiang Zhou , Maria Liakata , Nikolaos Aletras

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting boosts Language Models' (LM) performance on a gamut of complex reasoning tasks, the generated reasoning chain does not necessarily reflect how the model arrives at the answer (aka. faithfulness). We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Qing Lyu , Shreya Havaldar , Adam Stein , Li Zhang , Delip Rao , Eric Wong , Marianna Apidianaki , Chris Callison-Burch