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Eliciting "chain of thought" (CoT) rationales -- sequences of token that convey a "reasoning" process -- has been shown to consistently improve LLM performance on tasks like question answering. More recent efforts have shown that such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Somin Wadhwa , Silvio Amir , Byron C. Wallace

Reasoning with a chain-of-thought (CoT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks but incurs significant inference costs due to the generation of long rationales. We propose Thinking States, a method that performs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ido Amos , Avi Caciularu , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson , Jonathan Herzig , Lior Shani , Idan Szpektor

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities by scaling test-time compute via long Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, recent findings suggest that raw token counts are unreliable proxies for reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Wei-Lin Chen , Liqian Peng , Tian Tan , Chao Zhao , Blake JianHang Chen , Ziqian Lin , Alec Go , Yu Meng

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has become a cornerstone of reasoning in large language models, yet its effectiveness is constrained by the limited expressiveness of discrete token sampling. Recent latent reasoning approaches attempt to alleviate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Renyu Fu , Guibo Luo

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

Chain-of-thought reasoning, while powerful, can produce unnecessarily verbose output for simpler problems. We present a framework for difficulty-aware reasoning that teaches models to dynamically adjust reasoning depth based on problem…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Abdul Waheed , Chancharik Mitra , Laurie Z. Wang , Deva Ramanan , Bhiksha Raj

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in many applications, including challenging reasoning problems via chain-of-thoughts (CoTs) techniques that generate ``thinking tokens'' before answering the questions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Hanlin Zhu , Shibo Hao , Zhiting Hu , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell , Yuandong Tian

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) 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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has widely enhanced mathematical reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but it still remains challenging for extending it to multimodal domains. Existing works either adopt a similar textual reasoning for image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xinyan Chen , Renrui Zhang , Dongzhi Jiang , Aojun Zhou , Shilin Yan , Weifeng Lin , Hongsheng Li

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

Few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While theoretical investigations have been conducted to understand CoT, the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Yingqian Cui , Pengfei He , Xianfeng Tang , Qi He , Chen Luo , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

We study how to extend chain-of-thought (CoT) beyond language to better handle multimodal reasoning. While CoT helps LLMs and VLMs articulate intermediate steps, its text-only form often fails on vision-intensive problems where key…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yifei Shao , Kun Zhou , Ziming Xu , Mohammad Atif Quamar , Shibo Hao , Zhen Wang , Zhiting Hu , Biwei Huang

Reasoning is critical for large language models (LLMs) to excel in a wide range of tasks. While methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and enhance LLM performance by decomposing problems into intermediate steps, they also incur…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Tingxu Han , Zhenting Wang , Chunrong Fang , Shiyu Zhao , Shiqing Ma , Zhenyu Chen

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive progress in complex reasoning tasks, largely driven by the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm, which decomposes difficult problems into intermediate steps. However, CoT reasoning…

Symbolic Computation · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Rui Wang , Zeming Wei , Yihao Zhang , Xiaokun Luan

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

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves model performance, it incurs significant time costs due to the generation of discrete CoT tokens (DCoT). Continuous CoT (CCoT) offers a more efficient alternative, but existing CCoT methods…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-04 Jianwei Wang , Ziming Wu , Fuming Lai , Shaobing Lian , Ziqian Zeng

Modern reasoning models, such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities but suffer from critical inefficiencies: high inference latency, excessive computational resource consumption, and a tendency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Hang Yuan , Bin Yu , Haotian Li , Shijun Yang , Christina Dan Wang , Zhou Yu , Xueyin Xu , Weizhen Qi , Kai Chen

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been proven effective in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Recent advancements, such as OpenAI's o1 and DeepSeek-R1, suggest that scaling up the length of CoT sequences during…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-17 Heming Xia , Chak Tou Leong , Wenjie Wang , Yongqi Li , Wenjie Li