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Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts large language models' (LLMs) performance on complex tasks but faces two key limitations: a lack of reliability when solely relying on LLM-generated reasoning chains and lower reasoning performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Feiyang Li , Peng Fang , Zhan Shi , Arijit Khan , Fang Wang , Weihao Wang , Xin Zhang , Yongjian Cui

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been shown to empirically improve Transformers' performance, and theoretically increase their expressivity to Turing completeness. However, whether Transformers can learn to generalize to CoT traces longer than…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Oliver Kraus , Yash Sarrof , Yuekun Yao , Alexander Koller , Michael Hahn

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces are increasingly used both to improve language model capability and to audit model behavior, implicitly assuming that the visible trace remains synchronized with the computation that determines the answer. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Wenkai Li , Fan Yang , Ananya Hazarika , Shaunak A. Mehta , Koichi Onoue

Chain-of-thought responses from language models improve performance across most benchmarks. However, it remains unclear to what extent these performance gains can be attributed to human-like task decomposition or simply the greater…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-25 Jacob Pfau , William Merrill , Samuel R. Bowman

Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models' (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Soochan Lee , Gunhee Kim

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique has proven effective in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, the performance gains are inconsistent across different tasks, and the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Peijie Liu , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

Recent thinking models trained with reinforcement learning and backward-checking CoT often suffer from overthinking: they produce excessively long outputs even on simple problems, wasting computation. Existing evaluations, based on token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Siqi Fan , Bowen Qin , Peng Han , Shuo Shang , Yequan Wang , Aixin Sun

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

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has proven effective for knowledge-intensive tasks, but is widely believed to offer limited benefit for reasoning-intensive problems such as math and code generation. We challenge this assumption by…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Negar Arabzadeh , Wenjie Ma , Sewon Min , Matei Zaharia

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a de-facto standard technique to elicit reasoning-like responses from large language models (LLMs), allowing them to spell out individual steps before giving a final answer. While the resemblance to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Gregor Bachmann , Yichen Jiang , Seyed Mohsen Moosavi Dezfooli , Moin Nabi

Recent advances in reasoning-focused Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces - intermediate reasoning steps generated before a final answer. These traces, as in DeepSeek R1, guide inference and train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Siddhant Bhambri , Upasana Biswas , Subbarao Kambhampati

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning and planning when trained on chainof-thought (CoT) data, where the step-by-step thought process is explicitly outlined by text tokens. However, this results in lengthy inputs where many words…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 DiJia Su , Hanlin Zhu , Yingchen Xu , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Qinqing Zheng

Large language models (LLMs) face inherent performance bottlenecks under parameter constraints, particularly in processing critical tokens that demand complex reasoning. Empirical analysis reveals challenging tokens induce abrupt gradient…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Yilong Chen , Junyuan Shang , Zhenyu Zhang , Yanxi Xie , Jiawei Sheng , Tingwen Liu , Shuohuan Wang , Yu Sun , Hua Wu , Haifeng Wang

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yang , Ke Lin , Xing Yu

With the rapid advancement of large reasoning models, long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance on complex tasks. However, this often comes with a significant increase in token usage. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Ruiqi Zhang , Changyi Xiao , Yixin Cao

Recent studies have discovered that Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) can dramatically improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when dealing with complex tasks involving mathematics or reasoning. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guhao Feng , Bohang Zhang , Yuntian Gu , Haotian Ye , Di He , Liwei Wang

Instructing the model to generate a sequence of intermediate steps, a.k.a., a chain of thought (CoT), is a highly effective method to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on arithmetics and symbolic reasoning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zhiyuan Li , Hong Liu , Denny Zhou , Tengyu Ma

Large reasoning models (LRMs) often generate extensive chain-of-thought (CoT) traces before producing a final answer. As explicit textual artifacts, these traces can be passed to other models to solve the same task, enabling cross-model…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Xinyuan Cheng , Beiduo Chen , Philipp Mondorf , Barbara Plank

Chain-of-thought (CoT) decoding enables language models to improve reasoning performance at the cost of high generation latency in decoding. Recent proposals have explored variants of contemplation tokens, a term we introduce that refers to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jeffrey Cheng , Benjamin Van Durme