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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs) but leads to substantial inference overhead, limiting deployment in resource-constrained settings. This paper investigates efficient CoT…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ziqian Bi , Kaijie Chen , Tianyang Wang , Junfeng Hao , Benji Peng , Xinyuan Song

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Lennart Meincke , Ethan Mollick , Lilach Mollick , Dan Shapiro

Recent advances in large reasoning language models (LRLMs) rely on test-time scaling, which extends long chain-of-thought (CoT) generation to solve complex tasks. However, overthinking in long CoT not only slows down the efficiency of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Chenxu Yang , Qingyi Si , Yongjie Duan , Zheliang Zhu , Chenyu Zhu , Qiaowei Li , Minghui Chen , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang

Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models' (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Soochan Lee , Gunhee Kim

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning improves multi-step mathematical problem solving in large language models but remains vulnerable to exposure bias and error accumulation, as early mistakes propagate irreversibly through autoregressive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Shidong Cao , Hongzhan Lin , Yuxuan Gu , Ziyang Luo , Jing Ma

Chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, which provide step-by-step reasoning to derive final answers, benefit LLMs in both inference and training. Incorporating rationales, either by generating them before answering during inference, or by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Wenhang Shi , Shuqing Bian , Yiren Chen , Xinyi Zhang , Zhe Zhao , Pengfei Hu , Wei Lu , Xiaoyong Du

Current research found the issue of Early Answering in large language models (LLMs), where the models already have an answer before generating the Chain-of-Thought (CoT). This phenomenon suggests a potential lack of necessary dependency…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Zezhong Wang , Xingshan Zeng , Weiwen Liu , Yufei Wang , Liangyou Li , Yasheng Wang , Lifeng Shang , Xin Jiang , Qun Liu , Kam-Fai Wong

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting plays an indispensable role in endowing large language models (LLMs) with complex reasoning capabilities. However, CoT currently faces two fundamental challenges: (1) Sufficiency, which ensures that the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xiangning Yu , Zhuohan Wang , Linyi Yang , Haoxuan Li , Anjie Liu , Xiao Xue , Jun Wang , Mengyue Yang

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often suffer from overthinking, generating verbose reasoning traces that compromise both computational efficiency and interpretability. Unlike prior efforts that rely on global length-based rewards, we propose…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Jialiang Hong , Taihang Zhen , Kai Chen , Jiaheng Liu , Junlan Feng , Wenpeng Zhu , Jing Huo , Yang Gao , Depeng Wang , Haitao Wan , Xi Yang , Boyan Wang , Fanyu Meng , Yuyao Zhang

Frontier reasoning models have exhibited incredible capabilities across a wide array of disciplines, driven by posttraining large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL). However, despite the widespread success of this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Aayush Karan , Yilun Du

Chain of thought (CoT) fine-tuning aims to endow large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities by training them on curated reasoning traces. It leverages both supervised and reinforced fine-tuning to cultivate human-like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Xiaoshu Chen , Sihang Zhou , Ke Liang , Duanyang Yuan , Haoyuan Chen , Xiaoyu Sun , Lingyuan Meng , Xinwang Liu

Large Language Models (LLMs) employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to deconstruct complex problems. While longer CoTs are often presumed superior, this paper challenges that notion, arguing that longer is not always better. Drawing on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yuyang Wu , Yifei Wang , Ziyu Ye , Tianqi Du , Stefanie Jegelka , Yisen Wang

Large language models (LMs) beyond a certain scale, demonstrate the emergent capability of generating free-text rationales for their predictions via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While CoT can yield dramatically improved performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-01 Peifeng Wang , Zhengyang Wang , Zheng Li , Yifan Gao , Bing Yin , Xiang Ren

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

Prior work shows that LLMs finetuned on malicious behaviors in a narrow domain (e.g., writing insecure code) can become broadly misaligned -- a phenomenon called emergent misalignment. We investigate whether this extends from conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-11 James Chua , Jan Betley , Mia Taylor , Owain Evans

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with chain-of-thought (CoT) achieve strong performance and offer a window into LLM behavior. However, recent evidence suggests that improvements in CoT capabilities often come with redundant reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Yibo Gao , Danyang Zhao , Qika Lin , Ming Ma , Jiayun Li , Yi Jiang , Kai He , Qianyi Xu , Bing Qin , Mengling Feng

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) holds a significant place in augmenting the reasoning performance for large language models (LLMs). While some studies focus on improving CoT accuracy through methods like retrieval enhancement, yet a rigorous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Lijie Hu , Liang Liu , Shu Yang , Xin Chen , Hongru Xiao , Mengdi Li , Pan Zhou , Muhammad Asif Ali , Di Wang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) generate chain-of-thought (CoT) traces before producing final outputs, introducing a dynamic internal state that may complicate control mechanisms such as refusal. Unlike instruction-tuned LLMs, where refusal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Kia-Jüng Yang , Dominik Meier , Jiachen Zhao , Terry Ruas , Bela Gipp

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a key technique for eliciting complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Although interpretable, its dependence on natural language limits the model's expressive bandwidth. Continuous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Sharan Ramjee