Related papers: Deep Thinking by Markov Chain of Continuous Though…

Complex problems, whether in math, logic, or planning, are solved by humans through a sequence of steps where the result of one step informs the next. In this work, we adopt the perspective that the reasoning power of Transformers is…

Reasoning models enhance performance by tackling problems in a step-by-step manner, decomposing them into sub-problems and exploring long chains of thought before producing an answer. However, applying extended reasoning to every step…

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…

Chain-of-thought and more broadly test-time compute are known to augment the expressive capabilities of language models and have led to major innovations in reasoning. Motivated by this success, this paper explores latent chain-of-thought…

Chain-of-thought responses from language models improve performance across most benchmarks. However, it remains unclear to what extent these performance gains can be attributed to human-like task decomposition or simply the greater…

Standard masked discrete diffusion models face limitations in reasoning tasks due to their inability to correct their own mistakes on the masking path. Since they rely on a fixed number of denoising steps, they are unable to adjust their…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Looped Transformers have been shown to empirically improve performance on reasoning tasks and to theoretically enhance expressivity by recursively increasing the number of computational steps. However, their…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting substantially improves the sample efficiency of transformers, reducing the complexity of tasks like parity learning from exponential to polynomial in the input length. However, generating explicit reasoning…

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…

Transformers demonstrate impressive performance on a range of reasoning benchmarks. To evaluate the degree to which these abilities are a result of actual reasoning, existing work has focused on developing sophisticated benchmarks for…

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…

Chain of thought (CoT) elicits reasoning in large language models by explicitly generating intermediate tokens. In contrast, latent thought reasoning operates directly in the continuous latent space, enabling computation beyond discrete…

This work provides the first theoretical analysis of training transformers to solve complex problems by recursively generating intermediate states, analogous to fine-tuning for chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. We consider training a…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning often fails to faithfully reflect a language model's underlying decision process. We address this by introducing a Markovian language model framework with an autoencoder-style reasoning bottleneck: all…

Multi-step reasoning ability of large language models is crucial in tasks such as math and tool utilization. Current researches predominantly focus on enhancing model performance in these multi-step reasoning tasks through fine-tuning with…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, most existing approaches focus on hard token decoding, which constrains reasoning…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision can substantially improve transformer performance, yet the mechanisms by which models learn to follow and benefit from CoT remain poorly understood. We investigate these learning dynamics through the lens…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is known to improve Large Language Models both empirically and in terms of theoretical approximation power. However, our understanding of the inner workings and conditions of apparition of CoT capabilities…

Latent Chain-of-Thought (Latent-CoT) aims to enable step-by-step computation without emitting long rationales, yet its mechanisms remain unclear. We study CODI, a continuous-thought teacher-student distillation model, on strictly sequential…

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…