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The verbosity of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning hinders its mass deployment in efficiency-critical applications. Recently, implicit CoT approaches have emerged, which encode reasoning steps within LLM's hidden embeddings (termed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-28 Yinhan He , Wendy Zheng , Yaochen Zhu , Zaiyi Zheng , Lin Su , Sriram Vasudevan , Qi Guo , Liangjie Hong , Jundong Li

Learning complex functions that involve multi-step reasoning poses a significant challenge for standard supervised learning from input-output examples. Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision, which provides intermediate reasoning steps together…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-23 Awni Altabaa , Omar Montasser , John Lafferty

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning and its variants have substantially improved the performance of language models on complex reasoning tasks, yet the precise mechanisms by which different strategies facilitate generalization remain poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Archiki Prasad , Mandar Joshi , Kenton Lee , Mohit Bansal , Peter Shaw

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. We find existing fine-tuning datasets frequently suffer from the "answer right but reasoning wrong" probelm, where…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zihang Li , Yuhang Wang , Yikun Zong , Wenhan Yu , Xiaokun Yuan , Runhan Jiang , Zirui Liu , Tong Yang , Arthur Jiang

Length generalization, the ability to solve problems of longer sequences than those observed during training, poses a core challenge of Transformer-based large language models (LLM). Although existing studies have predominantly focused on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhouqi Hua , Wenwei Zhang , Chengqi Lyu , Yuzhe Gu , Songyang Gao , Kuikun Liu , Dahua Lin , Kai Chen

Recent theoretical work has identified surprisingly simple reasoning problems, such as checking if two nodes in a graph are connected or simulating finite-state machines, that are provably unsolvable by standard transformers that answer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal

Modern large language models generate text autoregressively, producing tokens one at a time. To study the learnability of such systems, Joshi et al. (COLT 2025) introduced a PAC-learning framework for next-token generators, the primitive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Steve Hanneke , Idan Mehalel , Shay Moran

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

Recent large language models support inputs of up to 10 million tokens, yet they perform poorly on long-context tasks that require complex reasoning. Such tasks can be solved using only a subset of the input -- a proxy context -- rather…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Miao Li , Irina Saparina , Alexander Gurung , Mirella Lapata

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is useful for monitoring language models only when the reasoning trace faithfully reflects the computation that produces the final answer. However, models can rely on prompt-to-answer shortcuts that bypass…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinghan Jia , Joe Benton , Eric Easley

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

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate significant reasoning capabilities, particularly through long chain-of-thought (CoT) processes, which can be elicited by reinforcement learning (RL). However, prolonged CoT reasoning presents…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Haoyuan Wu , Xueyi Chen , Rui Ming , Jilong Gao , Shoubo Hu , Zhuolun He , Bei Yu

Recent research has demonstrated that Universal Multimodal Embedding (UME) benefits significantly from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. In this paradigm, a generative model produces explicit reasoning traces for a multimodal query, with…

Explicit Chain-of-Thought improves the reasoning performance of large language models but often incurs high inference cost due to verbose token-level traces. While recent approaches reduce this overhead via concise prompting or step…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Yunlong Chu , Minglai Shao , Yuhang Liu , Bing Hao , Yumeng Lin , Jialu Wang , Ruijie Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a standard approach for eliciting reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). However, the common CoT paradigm treats thinking as a prerequisite for answering, which can delay access to plausible…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Dachuan Shi , Hanlin Zhu , Xiangchi Yuan , Wanjia Zhao , Kejing Xia , Wen Xiao , Wenke Lee

Despite the remarkable successes of large language models (LLMs), the underlying Transformer architecture has inherent limitations in handling complex reasoning tasks. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a practical workaround,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Jiaqi Wei , Chenyu You , Dujian Ding

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning in large language models (LLMs), the excessive length of reasoning tokens increases latency and KV cache memory usage, and may even truncate final answers under context limits. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Gengyang Li , Yifeng Gao , Yuming Li , Yunfang Wu

Recent advances in large reasoning language models (LRLMs) rely on test-time scaling, which extends long chain-of-thought (CoT) generation to solve complex tasks. However, overthinking in long CoT not only slows down the efficiency of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Chenxu Yang , Qingyi Si , Yongjie Duan , Zheliang Zhu , Chenyu Zhu , Qiaowei Li , Minghui Chen , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang

Large language models have shown remarkable reasoning abilities and scaling laws suggest that large parameter count, especially along the depth axis, is the primary driver. In this work, we make a stronger claim -- many reasoning problems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nikunj Saunshi , Nishanth Dikkala , Zhiyuan Li , Sanjiv Kumar , Sashank J. Reddi

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves large language models (LLMs) on difficult tasks, but it also makes inference expensive because every intermediate step must be generated as a discrete token. Latent reasoning reduces visible token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xuan Li , Yining Wang , Yuchen Liu , Guanjun Liu , Delai Qiu , Shengping Liu , Jiaen Liang , Wei Huang , Jun Yu , Junnan Zhu