English
Related papers

Related papers: Trace Length is a Simple Uncertainty Signal in Rea…

200 papers

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a common technique for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extended reasoning is often unnecessary and substantially increases token usage. As such, a key question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

Large language models (LLMs) often produce confident yet incorrect answers, which can lead to risky failures in real-world applications. We study whether post-training can make a model's self-assessment explicit: when the model is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Junyu Guo , Shangding Gu , Ming Jin , Costas Spanos , Javad Lavaei

Long chains of thought (CoT) from current language models frequently contain logical gaps and unjustified leaps, limiting the gains from additional test-time compute. Improving reasoning quality directly would require process reward models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingchu Gai , Guanning Zeng , Christina Baek , Chen Wu , J. Zico Kolter , Andrej Risteski , Aditi Raghunathan

Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on complex tasks, largely due to the adoption of Long Chain-of-Thought (Long CoT) reasoning. However, they often exhibit overthinking -- performing unnecessary…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-30 Keqin Peng , Liang Ding , Yuanxin Ouyang , Meng Fang , Dacheng Tao

Recently, techniques such as explicit structured reasoning have demonstrated strong test-time scaling behavior by enforcing a separation between the model's internal "thinking" process and the final response. A key factor influencing answer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Roy Eisenstadt , Itamar Zimerman , Lior Wolf

Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. However, the continual learning aspect of these aligned LLMs has been largely overlooked. Existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Xiao Wang , Yuansen Zhang , Tianze Chen , Songyang Gao , Senjie Jin , Xianjun Yang , Zhiheng Xi , Rui Zheng , Yicheng Zou , Tao Gui , Qi Zhang , Xuanjing Huang

Models employing long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning have shown superior performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, this capability introduces a critical and often overlooked inefficiency -- overthinking -- models often engage in…

Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning…

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on long-form, multi-step reasoning to solve complex tasks such as mathematical problem solving and scientific question answering. Despite strong performance, existing confidence estimation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Zhenjiang Mao , Anirudhh Venkat , Artem Bisliouk , Akshat Kothiyal , Sindhura Kumbakonam Subramanian , Saithej Singhu , Ivan Ruchkin

Uncertainty calibration is essential for the safe deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly when users rely on verbalized confidence estimates. While prior work has focused on classifiers or short-form generation, confidence…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Chaeyun Jang , Moonseok Choi , Yegon Kim , Hyungi Lee , Juho Lee

Large language models (LLMs) exhibiting test-time scaling behavior, such as extended reasoning traces and self-verification, have demonstrated remarkable performance on complex, long-term reasoning tasks. However, the robustness of these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Gleb Rodionov

Understanding a program's runtime reasoning behavior, meaning how intermediate states and control flows lead to final execution results, is essential for reliable code generation, debugging, and automated reasoning. Although large language…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Mohammad Abdollahi , Khandaker Rifah Tasnia , Soumit Kanti Saha , Jinqiu Yang , Song Wang , Hadi Hemmati

We study the source of uncertainty in DeepSeek R1-32B by analyzing its self-reported verbal confidence on question answering (QA) tasks. In the default answer-then-confidence setting, the model is regularly over-confident, whereas semantic…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Jakub Podolak , Rajeev Verma

This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-11 Mosh Levy , Alon Jacoby , Yoav Goldberg

Large Language Models (LLMs) with extended reasoning capabilities often generate verbose and redundant reasoning traces, incurring unnecessary computational cost. While existing reinforcement learning approaches address this by optimizing…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Chengwei Wei , Jung-jae Kim , Longyin Zhang , Shengkai Chen , Nancy F. Chen

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly rely on step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to improve task performance, particularly in high-resource languages such as English. While recent work has examined final-answer accuracy in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Raoyuan Zhao , Yihong Liu , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Reasoning LLMs (RLLMs) generate step-by-step chains of thought (CoTs) before giving an answer, which improves performance on complex tasks and makes reasoning more transparent. But how robust are these reasoning traces to disruptions that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Alexander von Recum , Leander Girrbach , Zeynep Akata

There is a growing literature on reasoning by large language models (LLMs), but the discussion on the uncertainty in their responses is still lacking. Our aim is to assess the extent of confidence that LLMs have in their answers and how it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Yudi Pawitan , Chris Holmes

Scaling inference compute enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs), with long chains-of-thought (CoTs) enabling strategies like backtracking and error correction. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial method for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Edward Yeo , Yuxuan Tong , Morry Niu , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue