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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs) but leads to substantial inference overhead, limiting deployment in resource-constrained settings. This paper investigates efficient CoT…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ziqian Bi , Kaijie Chen , Tianyang Wang , Junfeng Hao , Benji Peng , Xinyuan Song

Chain-of-thought (CoT) via prompting is the de facto method for eliciting reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). But for what kinds of tasks is this extra ``thinking'' really helpful? To analyze this, we conducted a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Zayne Sprague , Fangcong Yin , Juan Diego Rodriguez , Dongwei Jiang , Manya Wadhwa , Prasann Singhal , Xinyu Zhao , Xi Ye , Kyle Mahowald , Greg Durrett

Recent breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs) have effectively improved their reasoning abilities, particularly on mathematical and logical problems that have verifiable answers, through techniques such as supervised finetuning (SFT)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Hongyi James Cai , Junlin Wang , Xiaoyin Chen , Bhuwan Dhingra

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with chain-of-thought (CoT) achieve strong performance and offer a window into LLM behavior. However, recent evidence suggests that improvements in CoT capabilities often come with redundant reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Yibo Gao , Danyang Zhao , Qika Lin , Ming Ma , Jiayun Li , Yi Jiang , Kai He , Qianyi Xu , Bing Qin , Mengling Feng

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting improves reasoning but often produces long and redundant traces that substantially increase inference cost. We present SyncThink, a training-free and plug-and-play decoding method that reduces CoT overhead…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Gengyang Li , Wang Cai , Yifeng Gao , Yunfang Wu

Chain-of-thought (CoT), tree-of-thought (ToT), and related techniques work surprisingly well in practice for some complex reasoning tasks with Large Language Models (LLMs), but why? This work seeks the underlying reasons by conducting…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Liwei Kang , Zirui Zhao , David Hsu , Wee Sun Lee

Recent developments have enabled advanced reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via long Chain-of-Thought (CoT), while long CoT suffers from high computational costs and significant latency losses owing to the autoregressive nature of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Chengzhengxu Li , Xiaoming Liu , Zhaohan Zhang , Shaochu Zhang , Shengchao Liu , Guoxin Ma , Yu Lan , Chao Shen

Recent impressive results from large reasoning models have been interpreted as a triumph of Chain of Thought (CoT), and especially of the process of training on CoTs sampled from base LLMs in order to help find new reasoning patterns. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Karthik Valmeekam , Vardhan Palod , Kaya Stechly , Atharva Gundawar , Subbarao Kambhampati

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly enhanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), especially when combined with reinforcement learning (RL) based post-training methods. While longer reasoning traces can improve…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Qinhang Wu , Sen Lin , Ming Zhang , Yingbin Liang , Ness B. Shroff

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being employed in real-world applications in critical domains such as healthcare, it is important to ensure that the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning generated by these models faithfully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Sree Harsha Tanneru , Dan Ley , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become the default strategy for enhancing LLM capabilities, yet its application raises a fundamental question: when is explicit reasoning actually beneficial? Empirical evidence reveals a striking…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Wei Xia , Haoqing Wang , Zhi-Hong Deng , Yehui Tang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning sometimes fails to faithfully reflect the true computation of a large language model (LLM), hampering its utility in explaining how LLMs arrive at their answers. Moreover, optimizing for faithfulness and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-19 Nithin Sivakumaran , Shoubin Yu , Hyunji Lee , Yue Zhang , Ali Payani , Mohit Bansal , Elias Stengel-Eskin

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate reasoning tokens before their final answer to boost performance on complex tasks. While these sequences seem like human thought processes, empirical evidence reveals that they are not a faithful…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Mosh Levy , Zohar Elyoseph , Shauli Ravfogel , Yoav Goldberg

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by encouraging step by step thinking. However, CoT-based methods depend on intermediate reasoning steps, which limits scalability and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Guanghao Li , Wenhao Jiang , Mingfeng Chen , Yan Li , Hao Yu , Shuting Dong , Tao Ren , Ming Tang , Chun Yuan

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting combined with few-shot in-context learning (ICL) has unlocked significant reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, ICL with CoT examples is ineffective on novel tasks when the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-08 Vignesh Kothapalli , Ata Fatahibaarzi , Hamed Firooz , Maziar Sanjabi

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation from Large Language Models (LLMs) often induces "overthinking" in Small Language Models (SLMs), leading to performance degradation and excessive token consumption. In this study, we propose Disciplined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Shunsuke Ubukata

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance in complex reasoning tasks through the use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, allowing models to break down problems into manageable sub-tasks. However, existing CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-11 Jean-Francois Ton , Muhammad Faaiz Taufiq , Yang Liu

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

Large language models (LLMs) are typically constrained to reason in the language space, where they express the reasoning process through a chain-of-thought (CoT) to solve complex problems. However, the language space may not always be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Shibo Hao , Sainbayar Sukhbaatar , DiJia Su , Xian Li , Zhiting Hu , Jason Weston , Yuandong Tian

We study how to scale reasoning token budgets for competitive programming through two complementary approaches: training-time reinforcement learning (RL) and test-time parallel thinking. During RL training, we observe an approximately…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Qianfan Zhang , Tianyu Guo , Xuandi Ren , Jiale Chen , Ming Ding , Ran Xin , Xia Xiao