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While LLMs have seen substantial improvement in reasoning capabilities, they also sometimes overthink, generating unnecessary reasoning steps, particularly under uncertainty, given ill-posed or ambiguous queries. We introduce statistically…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Yangxinyu Xie , Tao Wang , Soham Mallick , Yan Sun , Georgy Noarov , Mengxin Yu , Tanwi Mallick , Weijie J. Su , Edgar Dobriban

Long chains of thought (CoT) from current language models frequently contain logical gaps and unjustified leaps, limiting the gains from additional test-time compute. Improving reasoning quality directly would require process reward models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingchu Gai , Guanning Zeng , Christina Baek , Chen Wu , J. Zico Kolter , Andrej Risteski , Aditi Raghunathan

Understanding a program's runtime reasoning behavior, meaning how intermediate states and control flows lead to final execution results, is essential for reliable code generation, debugging, and automated reasoning. Although large language…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Mohammad Abdollahi , Khandaker Rifah Tasnia , Soumit Kanti Saha , Jinqiu Yang , Song Wang , Hadi Hemmati

Recent reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable problem-solving abilities but often generate long thinking traces whose utility is unclear. Our work aims to improve their efficiency, enabling them to reach high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Liu , Xuming Hu , Xiaowen Chu , Eunsol Choi

Many of the recent capabilities demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) arise primarily from their ability to exploit contextual information. In this paper, we explore ways to improve reasoning capabilities of LLMs through (1)…

Recent studies show that the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can be improved by applying Reinforcement Learning (RL) to question-answering (QA) tasks in areas such as math and coding. With a long context length, LLMs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Stephen Chung , Wenyu Du , Jie Fu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language model performance on complex tasks, but often produces excessively long and inefficient reasoning traces. Existing methods shorten CoTs using length penalties or global entropy…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Xuan Xiong , Huan Liu , Li Gu , Zhixiang Chi , Yue Qiu , Yuanhao Yu , Yang Wang

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Mingyu Jin , Qinkai Yu , Dong Shu , Haiyan Zhao , Wenyue Hua , Yanda Meng , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit strong linguistic abilities while remaining unreliable on multi-step reasoning tasks, particularly when deployed without additional training or fine-tuning. In this work, we study inference-time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Vinay Sharma , Manish Jain

Training large language models (LLMs) with synthetic reasoning data has become a popular approach to enhancing their reasoning capabilities, while a key factor influencing the effectiveness of this paradigm is the quality of the generated…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Zhuojie Yang , Wentao Wan , Keze Wang

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Zuoli Tang , Junjie Ou , Kaiqin Hu , Chunwei Wu , Zhaoxin Huan , Chilin Fu , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Chenliang Li

Large language models (LLMs) now solve multi-step problems by emitting extended chains of thought. During the process, they often re-derive the same intermediate steps across problems, inflating token usage and latency. This saturation of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Aniket Didolkar , Nicolas Ballas , Sanjeev Arora , Anirudh Goyal

Entropy minimization (EM) trains the model to concentrate even more probability mass on its most confident outputs. We show that this simple objective alone, without any labeled data, can substantially improve large language models' (LLMs)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Shivam Agarwal , Zimin Zhang , Lifan Yuan , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng

Reasoning LLMs show improved performance with longer chains of thought. However, recent work has highlighted their tendency to overthink, continuing to revise answers even after reaching the correct solution. We quantitatively confirm this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Xi Wang , James McInerney , Lequn Wang , Nathan Kallus

Large Language Models (LLMs) consistently benefit from scaled Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but also suffer from heavy computational overhead. To address this issue, efficient reasoning aims to incentivize short yet accurate thinking…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Taiqiang Wu , Zenan Xu , Bo Zhou , Ngai Wong

The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have improved substantially through increased test-time computation, typically in the form of intermediate tokens known as chain-of-thought (CoT). However, CoT often becomes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Nathanaël Carraz Rakotonirina , Ren Pang , Neha Anna John , Michael Bohlke-Schneider , Momchil Hardalov

Existing methods to enhance the reasoning capability of large language models predominantly rely on supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) on reasoning-specific data. These approaches critically depend on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Qingyang Zhang , Haitao Wu , Changqing Zhang , Peilin Zhao , Yatao Bian

Entropy-based deep reasoning has emerged as a promising direction for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), but existing methods often either increase response length indiscriminately or shorten responses at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Shuyu Wei , Jian Sun , Delai Qiu , Yining Wang , Shengping Liu , Jiaen Liang , Ying Fu , Wei Huang , Jitao Sang

Tool-using agents based on Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in tasks such as mathematical reasoning and multi-hop question answering. However, in long trajectories, agents often trigger excessive and low-quality tool calls, increasing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Zeping Li , Hongru Wang , Yiwen Zhao , Guanhua Chen , Yixia Li , Keyang Chen , Yixin Cao , Guangnan Ye , Hongfeng Chai , Zhenfei Yin

Recent advances in speech large language models (speech LLMs) have enabled seamless spoken interactions, but these systems still struggle with complex reasoning tasks. Previously, chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or fine-tuning has been to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-10 Yi-Jen Shih , Desh Raj , Chunyang Wu , Wei Zhou , SK Bong , Yashesh Gaur , Jay Mahadeokar , Ozlem Kalinli , Mike Seltzer