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Related papers: Mapping Faithful Reasoning in Language Models

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When prompted to think step-by-step, language models (LMs) produce a chain of thought (CoT), a sequence of reasoning steps that the model supposedly used to produce its prediction. Despite much work on CoT prompting, it is unclear if…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Martin Tutek , Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori , Ana Marasović , Yonatan Belinkov

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is widely applied to enhance the LLM capability in math, coding and reasoning tasks. However, its performance is limited for open-domain tasks, when there are no clearly defined reasoning steps or logical transitions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Qingqing Gu , Dan Wang , Yue Zhao , Xiaoyu Wang , Zhonglin Jiang , Yong Chen , Hongyan Li , Luo Ji

Recent advances in reasoning-focused Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces - intermediate reasoning steps generated before a final answer. These traces, as in DeepSeek R1, guide inference and train…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Siddhant Bhambri , Upasana Biswas , Subbarao Kambhampati

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled transformer-based language models to excel at complex mathematics and multi-step planning. However, in standard decoder-only architectures, these reasoning steps are externalized in natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Wenquan Lu , Yuechuan Yang , Kyle Lee , Yanshu Li , Enqi Liu

Getting language models to reason correctly about code requires training on data where each reasoning step can be checked. Current synthetic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training data often consists of plausible-sounding explanations generated by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Shailja Thakur , Vaibhav Saxena , Rohan Kulkarni , Shivdeep Singh , Parameswaran Selvam , Hima Patel , Hiroshi Kanayama

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning generated by large language models (LLMs) is often unfaithful: intermediate steps can be logically inconsistent or fail to reflect the causal relationship leading to the final answer. Despite extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Fuxin Wang , Amr Alazali , Yiqiao Zhong

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting reliably improves language-model accuracy, but which properties of a rationale text drive the improvement is poorly understood. Prior work has largely studied generation-time behavior. We instead ask a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Xiang Wang , Wei Wei

Language models trained via outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to reason using chain-of-thought (CoT) have shown remarkable performance. Monitoring such a model's CoT may allow us to understand its intentions and detect potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Arun Jose

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrably enhanced the performance of Large Language Models on tasks requiring multi-step inference. This success has led to widespread claims of emergent reasoning capabilities in these models. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jintian Shao , Yiming Cheng

Current Large Language Models (LLMs), especially Large Reasoning Models, can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning traces to illustrate how they produce final outputs, thereby facilitating trust calibration for users. However, these CoT…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Shiwei Chen , Niruthikka Sritharan , Xiaolin Wen , Chenxi Zhang , Xingbo Wang , Yong Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly benefit from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in performing various reasoning tasks. While CoT allows models to produce more comprehensive reasoning processes, its emphasis on intermediate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Zhan Ling , Yunhao Fang , Xuanlin Li , Zhiao Huang , Mingu Lee , Roland Memisevic , Hao Su

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manqing Liu , David Williams-King , Ida Caspary , Linh Le , Hannes Whittingham , Puria Radmard , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning through intermediate steps in natural language form. Briefly, CoT enables LLMs to think step by step.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Caoyun Fan , Jidong Tian , Yitian Li , Wenqing Chen , Hao He , Yaohui Jin

Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has delivered success on complex reasoning tasks, which aims at designing a simple prompt like ``Let's think step by step'' or multiple in-context exemplars with well-designed rationales to elicit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-04 Jianing Wang , Qiushi Sun , Xiang Li , Ming Gao

We present the surprising finding that a language model's reasoning capabilities can be improved by training on synthetic datasets of chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from more capable models, even when all of those traces lead to an incorrect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Abhranil Chandra , Ayush Agrawal , Arian Hosseini , Sebastian Fischmeister , Rishabh Agarwal , Navin Goyal , Aaron Courville

Latent or continuous chain-of-thought methods replace explicit textual rationales with a number of internal latent steps, but these intermediate computations are difficult to evaluate beyond correlation-based probes. In this paper, we view…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zirui Li , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yizhi Li , Jian Yang , Chenghua Lin , Min Zhang

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is as important as predictive accuracy. Extended reasoning via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Robert Welch , Emir Konuk , Kevin Smith

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving large language model performance on complex tasks, but recent work shows that reasoning steps often fail to causally influence the final answer, creating brittle…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex problems, but remains constrained by the computational cost and reasoning path collapse when grounded in discrete token spaces. Recent latent reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Jiecong Wang , Hao Peng , Chunyang Liu