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Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is widely used as a reasoning aid and is often treated as a transparency mechanism. Yet behavioral gains under CoT do not imply that the model's internal computation causally depends on the emitted reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Anish Sathyanarayanan , Aditya Nagarsekar , Aarush Rathore

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

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yufeng Zhang , Xuepeng Wang , Lingxiang Wu , Jinqiao Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is useful for monitoring language models only when the reasoning trace faithfully reflects the computation that produces the final answer. However, models can rely on prompt-to-answer shortcuts that bypass…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinghan Jia , Joe Benton , Eric Easley

As chain-of-thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kyle Cox , Darius Kianersi , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

Recent advances have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle reasoning tasks by generating chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, yet these gains have largely applied to high-resource languages, leaving low-resource languages behind. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Khanh-Tung Tran , Barry O'Sullivan , Hoang D. Nguyen

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Tergel Munkhbat , Namgyu Ho , Seo Hyun Kim , Yongjin Yang , Yujin Kim , Se-Young Yun

This study investigates the internal information flow of large language models (LLMs) while performing chain-of-thought (CoT) style reasoning. Specifically, with a particular interest in the faithfulness of the CoT explanation to LLMs'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Keito Kudo , Yoichi Aoki , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Shusaku Sone , Masaya Taniguchi , Ana Brassard , Keisuke Sakaguchi , Kentaro Inui

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in reasoning tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting. However, CoT prompting greatly increases computational demands, which has prompted growing interest in distilling CoT capabilities into Small…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Xinghao Chen , Zhijing Sun , Wenjin Guo , Miaoran Zhang , Yanjun Chen , Yirong Sun , Hui Su , Yijie Pan , Dietrich Klakow , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

As Large Language Models (LLMs) scale up and gain powerful Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) reasoning abilities, practical resource constraints drive efforts to distill these capabilities into more compact Smaller Language Models (SLMs). We find…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-31 Chengwei Dai , Kun Li , Wei Zhou , Songlin Hu

Eliciting "chain of thought" (CoT) rationales -- sequences of token that convey a "reasoning" process -- has been shown to consistently improve LLM performance on tasks like question answering. More recent efforts have shown that such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-01 Somin Wadhwa , Silvio Amir , Byron C. Wallace

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring has emerged as a compelling method for detecting harmful behaviors such as reward hacking for reasoning models, under the assumption that models' reasoning processes are informative of such behaviors. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Nikolaus Howe , Micah Carroll

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, which offers step-by-step problem-solving rationales, has impressively unlocked the reasoning potential of large language models (LLMs). Yet, the standard CoT is less effective in problems demanding…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Song Jiang , Zahra Shakeri , Aaron Chan , Maziar Sanjabi , Hamed Firooz , Yinglong Xia , Bugra Akyildiz , Yizhou Sun , Jinchao Li , Qifan Wang , Asli Celikyilmaz

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

Explanations are often promoted as tools for transparency, but they can also foster confirmation bias; users may assume reasoning is correct whenever outputs appear acceptable. We study this double-edged role of Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Eunkyu Park , Wesley Hanwen Deng , Vasudha Varadarajan , Mingxi Yan , Gunhee Kim , Maarten Sap , Motahhare Eslami

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…

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

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored. We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yanjie He

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

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