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Investigating the reasoning abilities of transformer models, and discovering new challenging tasks for them, has been a topic of much interest. Recent studies have found these models to be surprisingly strong at performing deductive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-12-17 Kyle Richardson , Ashish Sabharwal

A new generation of AI models generates step-by-step reasoning text before producing an answer. This text appears to offer a human-readable window into their computation process, and is increasingly relied upon for transparency and…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Mosh Levy , Zohar Elyoseph , Yoav Goldberg

This work characterizes large language models' chain-of-thought generation as a structured trajectory through representation space. We show that mathematical reasoning traverses functionally ordered, step-specific subspaces that become…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Lihao Sun , Hang Dong , Bo Qiao , Qingwei Lin , Dongmei Zhang , Saravan Rajmohan

Reasoning is a fundamental capability for solving complex multi-step problems, particularly in visual contexts where sequential step-wise understanding is essential. Existing approaches lack a comprehensive framework for evaluating visual…

In this paper we examine the limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) for complex reasoning tasks. Although recent works have started to employ formal languages as an intermediate representation for reasoning tasks, they often face…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Shashank Kirtania , Priyanshu Gupta , Arjun Radhakirshna

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables reasoning in language models but requires explicit verbalization of intermediate steps. Looped transformers offer an alternative by iteratively refining representations within hidden states. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Markus Frey , Behzad Shomali , Ali Hamza Bashir , David Berghaus , Joachim Koehler , Mehdi Ali

Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting have enabled large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning. However, the explainability of such reasoning remains limited, with prior work primarily focusing on local…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Sheldon Yu , Yuxin Xiong , Junda Wu , Xintong Li , Tong Yu , Xiang Chen , Ritwik Sinha , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley

Transformers are emerging as the new workhorse of NLP, showing great success across tasks. Unlike LSTMs, transformers process input sequences entirely through self-attention. Previous work has suggested that the computational capabilities…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-06-28 Michael Hahn

Large language models (LLMs) tend to externalize their reasoning in their chain of thought, making the chain of thought a good target for monitoring. This is partially an inherent feature of the Transformer architecture: sufficiently long…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Jonah Brown-Cohen , David Lindner , Rohin Shah

Logical reasoning task has attracted great interest since it was proposed. Faced with such a task, current competitive models, even large language models (e.g., ChatGPT and PaLM 2), still perform badly. Previous promising LMs struggle in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-30 Fangzhi Xu , Qika Lin , Tianzhe Zhao , Jiawei Han , Jun Liu

Language and vision-language models have shown impressive performance across a wide range of tasks, but their internal mechanisms remain only partly understood. In this work, we study how individual attention heads in text-generative models…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Lorenzo Basile , Valentino Maiorca , Diego Doimo , Francesco Locatello , Alberto Cazzaniga

State-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) are accredited with an increasing number of different capabilities, ranging from reading comprehension, over advanced mathematical and reasoning skills to possessing scientific knowledge. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Neeladri Bhuiya , Viktor Schlegel , Stefan Winkler

Reasoning is an integral part of many tasks performed by language models (LMs). However, the effects of scaling model sizes and data on reasoning abilities at pretraining time remain understudied. To rigorously investigate this problem, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Xinyi Wang , Shawn Tan , Shenbo Xu , Mingyu Jin , William Yang Wang , Rameswar Panda , Yikang Shen

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (LLMs) explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps prior to generating final answers, helping the model excel in complex problem-solving. In this paper, we demonstrate that this emerging…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Tong Wu , Chong Xiang , Jiachen T. Wang , G. Edward Suh , Prateek Mittal

The prevailing approach to distilling reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs)-behavioral cloning from textual rationales-is fundamentally limited. It teaches Small Language Models (SLMs) to mimic surface-level patterns rather than the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiangyu Wen , Junhua Huang , Zeju Li , Min Li , Jianyuan Zhong , Zhijian Xu , Mingxuan Yuan , Yongxiang Huang , Qiang Xu

While next-token prediction (NTP) has been the standard objective for training language models, it often struggles to capture global structure in reasoning tasks. Multi-token prediction (MTP) has recently emerged as a promising alternative,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Jianhao Huang , Zhanpeng Zhou , Renqiu Xia , Baharan Mirzasoleiman , Weijie Su , Wei Huang

In this work, we explore techniques for augmenting interactive agents with information from symbolic modules, much like humans use tools like calculators and GPS systems to assist with arithmetic and navigation. We test our agent's…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-14 Ruoyao Wang , Peter Jansen , Marc-Alexandre Côté , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

Binary vulnerability analysis is increasingly performed by LLM-based agents in an iterative, multi-pass manner, with the model as the core decision-maker. However, how such systems organize exploration over hundreds of reasoning steps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Qiang Li , XiangRui Zhang , Haining Wang

To improve the explainability of leading Transformer networks used in NLP, it is important to tease apart genuine symbolic rules from merely associative input-output patterns. However, we identify several inconsistencies in how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-02 Tommi Gröndahl , Yujia Guo , N. Asokan

The field of mechanistic interpretability in pre-trained transformer models has demonstrated substantial evidence supporting the ''linear representation hypothesis'', which is the idea that high level concepts are encoded as vectors in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Damjan Kalajdzievski