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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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a method that enables language models to handle complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler steps. Despite its success, the underlying mechanics of CoT are not yet fully understood. In an attempt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Yingcong Li , Kartik Sreenivasan , Angeliki Giannou , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) is an essential ingredient in effective usage of modern large language models, but our understanding of the reasoning strategies underlying these capabilities remains limited. While some prior works have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Seongyun Lee , Seungone Kim , Minju Seo , Yongrae Jo , Dongyoung Go , Hyeonbin Hwang , Jinho Park , Xiang Yue , Sean Welleck , Graham Neubig , Moontae Lee , Minjoon Seo

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emergent capabilities across diverse reasoning tasks via popular Chains-of-Thought (COT) prompting. However, such a simple and fast COT approach often encounters limitations in dealing with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Jiabao Pan , Yan Zhang , Chen Zhang , Zuozhu Liu , Hongwei Wang , Haizhou Li

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used inference-time technique for improving reasoning, yet its gains are uneven across tasks. We analyze when and why CoT helps by modeling the step-wise reasoning trajectory as a Markov chain.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zihan Wang , Yijun Dong , Qi Lei

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) reasoning has become a foundation for eliciting multi-step reasoning in large language models, but recent studies show that its benefits do not scale monotonically with chain length: while longer CoT generally enables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bin Lei , Caiwen Ding , Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Xin Eric Wang

While chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation from advanced large language models (LLMs) has proven effective in general reasoning tasks, it struggles in scientific domains where even advanced models often produce incorrect or superficial…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Kehua Feng , Keyan Ding , Zhihui Zhu , Lei Liang , Qiang Zhang , Huajun Chen

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

Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has been proposed as a way of assisting LLMs in performing complex reasoning. However, developing effective prompts can be a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Yuxin Tang

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to improve problem-solving and provide seemingly transparent explanations. However, growing evidence shows that CoT often fail to faithfully represent the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Xu Shen , Song Wang , Zhen Tan , Laura Yao , Xinyu Zhao , Kaidi Xu , Xin Wang , Tianlong Chen

Recent reasoning large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable improvements in mathematical reasoning capabilities through long Chain-of-Thought. The reasoning tokens of these models enable self-correction within reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-02 Yu Cui , Bryan Hooi , Yujun Cai , Yiwei Wang

When a language model sees a document contradicting its training knowledge, it must choose: follow the document or trust itself. Prior work proved this choice depends on how well-known the fact is. We ask: does the model's chain-of-thought…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Pruthvinath Jeripity Venkata

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

Safety-critical planning in complex environments, particularly at urban intersections, remains a fundamental challenge for autonomous driving. Existing methods, whether rule-based or data-driven, frequently struggle to capture complex scene…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Kefei Tian , Yuansheng Lian , Kai Yang , Xiangdong Chen , Shen Li

Chain-of-thought (CoT) has emerged as a powerful technique to elicit reasoning in large language models and improve a variety of downstream tasks. CoT mainly demonstrates excellent performance in English, but its usage in low-resource…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Linzheng Chai , Jian Yang , Tao Sun , Hongcheng Guo , Jiaheng Liu , Bing Wang , Xiannian Liang , Jiaqi Bai , Tongliang Li , Qiyao Peng , Zhoujun Li

This position paper argues that large language model (LLM) reasoning should be studied as latent-state trajectory formation rather than as faithful surface chain-of-thought (CoT). This matters because claims about faithfulness,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Wenshuo Wang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex reasoning by leveraging chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to generate intermediate reasoning chains as the rationale to infer the answer. However, existing CoT studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Zhuosheng Zhang , Aston Zhang , Mu Li , Hai Zhao , George Karypis , Alex Smola

LLMs can perform multi-step reasoning through Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but they cannot reliably verify their own logic. Even when they reach correct answers, the underlying reasoning may be flawed, undermining trust in high-stakes scenarios.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-07 Yu Feng , Nathaniel Weir , Kaj Bostrom , Sam Bayless , Darion Cassel , Sapana Chaudhary , Benjamin Kiesl-Reiter , Huzefa Rangwala

Large language models (LLMs) possess vast semantic knowledge but often struggle with complex reasoning tasks, particularly in relational reasoning problems such as kinship or spatial reasoning. In this paper, we present Path-of-Thoughts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Ge Zhang , Mohammad Ali Alomrani , Hongjian Gu , Jiaming Zhou , Yaochen Hu , Bin Wang , Qun Liu , Mark Coates , Yingxue Zhang , Jianye Hao