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The chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm uses the elicitation of step-by-step rationales as a proxy for reasoning, gradually refining the model's latent representation of a solution. However, it remains unclear just how early a Large Language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Joey David

Although Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has achieved remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), the mechanism of CoT remains a ``black box''. Even if the correct answers can frequently be obtained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiarun Fu , Lizhong Ding , Hao Li , Pengqi Li , Qiuning Wei , Xu Chen

Frontier reasoning models are produced by posttraining base language models with reinforcement learning. Recent work has challenged this by showing that sampling from a sharpened version of the base model's distribution, a so-called power…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Felix Zhou , Anay Mehrotra , Quanquan C. Liu

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being employed in real-world applications in critical domains such as healthcare, it is important to ensure that the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning generated by these models faithfully…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-07-02 Sree Harsha Tanneru , Dan Ley , Chirag Agarwal , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning exposes the intermediate thinking process of large language models (LLMs), yet verifying those traces at scale remains unsolved. In response, we introduce the idea of decision pivots-minimal, verifiable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dongkyu Cho , Amy B. Z. Zhang , Bilel Fehri , Sheng Wang , Rumi Chunara , Hengrui Cai , Rui Song

Test-time scaling has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning, yet the limitations of current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation obscures whether performance gains stem from genuine reasoning or mere verbosity. To…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Zhizhang Fu , Yuancheng Gu , Chenkai Hu , Hanmeng Liu , Yue Zhang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) spend substantial test-time compute on long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, but what *characterizes* an effective CoT remains unclear. While prior work reports gains from lengthening CoTs and increasing review…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Yunzhen Feng , Julia Kempe , Cheng Zhang , Parag Jain , Anthony Hartshorn

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to break down complex problems into interpretable intermediate steps, significantly enhancing model transparency and performance in reasoning tasks. However, conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Junda Wu , Yuxin Xiong , Xintong Li , Sheldon Yu , Zhengmian Hu , Tong Yu , Rui Wang , Xiang Chen , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley

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) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). CoT explicitly encourages the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem, by providing a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Boshi Wang , Sewon Min , Xiang Deng , Jiaming Shen , You Wu , Luke Zettlemoyer , Huan Sun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive mathematical reasoning capabilities, yet their performance remains brittle to minor variations in problem description and prompting strategy. Furthermore, reasoning is vulnerable to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Sam Silver , Jimin Sun , Ivan Zhang , Sara Hooker , Eddie Kim

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong reasoning performance through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, yet often generate unnecessarily long reasoning paths that incur high inference cost. Recent self-consistency-based approaches…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Juming Xiong , Kevin Guo , Congning Ni , Chao Yan , Katherine Brown , Avinash Baidya , Xiang Gao , Bradley Malin , Zhijun Yin

Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining. Similarly, Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-19 Baohao Liao , Hanze Dong , Yuhui Xu , Doyen Sahoo , Christof Monz , Junnan Li , Caiming Xiong

Recent advances in test-time scaling have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to display sophisticated reasoning abilities via extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation. Despite their potential, these Reasoning LLMs (RLMs) often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Zhen Xiong , Yujun Cai , Zhecheng Li , Yiwei Wang

Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear. We analyze reasoning dynamics in 18 VLMs covering instruction-tuned and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Danae Sánchez Villegas , Samuel Lewis-Lim , Nikolaos Aletras , Desmond Elliott

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zongqian Wu , Baoduo Xu , Ruochen Cui , Mengmeng Zhan , Xiaofeng Zhu , Lei Feng

Recent years have witnessed significant progress in large language models' (LLMs) reasoning, which is largely due to the chain-of-thought (CoT) approaches, allowing models to generate intermediate reasoning steps before reaching the final…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-15 Zuoli Tang , Junjie Ou , Kaiqin Hu , Chunwei Wu , Zhaoxin Huan , Chilin Fu , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Chenliang Li

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is a promising tool for detecting misbehaviors and understanding the motivations of modern reasoning models. However, if models can control what they verbalize in their CoT, it could undermine CoT…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Chen Yueh-Han , Robert McCarthy , Bruce W. Lee , He He , Ian Kivlichan , Bowen Baker , Micah Carroll , Tomek Korbak

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

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