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Related papers: Thought Branches: Interpreting LLM Reasoning Requi…

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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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has driven recent gains of large language models (LLMs) on reasoning-intensive tasks by externalizing intermediate steps. However, excessive or redundant reasoning -- so-called overthinking -- can increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Renliang Sun , Wei Cheng , Dawei Li , Haifeng Chen , Wei Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a step-wise and coherent reasoning chain, shows its impressive strength when used as a prompting strategy for large language models (LLM). Recent years, the prominent effect of CoT prompting has attracted emerging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Zihan Yu , Liang He , Zhen Wu , Xinyu Dai , Jiajun Chen

Training large language models (LLMs) with chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision has proven effective for enhancing their reasoning abilities. However, obtaining reliable and accurate reasoning supervision remains a significant challenge. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Dongwon Jung , Wenxuan Zhou , Muhao Chen

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in socially sensitive settings despite substantial documentation that they encode gender biases. Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been proposed as a bias-mitigation approach.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Edie Pearman , Sophia Osborne , Mira Kandlikar-Bloch , Mina Arzaghi , Florian Carichon , Golnoosh Farnadi

Large language models (LLMs) can produce chains of thought (CoT) that do not accurately reflect the actual factors driving their answers. In multiple-choice settings with an injected hint favoring a particular option, models may shift their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Parsa Mirtaheri , Mikhail Belkin

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex, long-horizon reasoning due to instability caused by their frozen policy assumption. Current test-time scaling methods treat execution feedback merely as an external signal for filtering or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhengbo Jiao , Hongyu Xian , Qinglong Wang , Yunpu Ma , Zhebo Wang , Zifan Zhang , Dezhang Kong , Meng Han

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve highly effective performance on various reasoning tasks by incorporating step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting as demonstrations. However, the reasoning chains of demonstrations generated by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-18 Jiashuo Sun , Yi Luo , Yeyun Gong , Chen Lin , Yelong Shen , Jian Guo , Nan Duan

Despite the remarkable successes of large language models (LLMs), the underlying Transformer architecture has inherent limitations in handling complex reasoning tasks. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a practical workaround,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Jiaqi Wei , Chenyu You , Dujian Ding

Learning complex functions that involve multi-step reasoning poses a significant challenge for standard supervised learning from input-output examples. Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision, which provides intermediate reasoning steps together…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-23 Awni Altabaa , Omar Montasser , John Lafferty

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…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) via prompting is the de facto method for eliciting reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). But for what kinds of tasks is this extra ``thinking'' really helpful? To analyze this, we conducted a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Zayne Sprague , Fangcong Yin , Juan Diego Rodriguez , Dongwei Jiang , Manya Wadhwa , Prasann Singhal , Xinyu Zhao , Xi Ye , Kyle Mahowald , Greg Durrett

The prevailing approach to distilling reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs)-behavioral cloning from textual rationales-is fundamentally limited. It teaches Small Language Models (SLMs) to mimic surface-level patterns rather than the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiangyu Wen , Junhua Huang , Zeju Li , Min Li , Jianyuan Zhong , Zhijian Xu , Mingxuan Yuan , Yongxiang Huang , Qiang Xu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces have been shown to improve performance of large language models on a plethora of reasoning tasks, yet there is no consensus on the mechanism by which this boost is achieved. To shed more light on this, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Soumadeep Saha , Akshay Chaturvedi , Saptarshi Saha , Utpal Garain , Nicholas Asher

Can we trust the reasoning traces that large reasoning models (LRMs) produce? We investigate whether these traces faithfully reflect what drives model outputs, and whether models will honestly report their influence. We introduce Thought…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Yijie Hao , Lingjie Chen , Ali Emami , Joyce Ho

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in domains where causal reasoning matters, yet it remains unclear whether their judgments reflect normative causal computation, human-like shortcuts, or brittle pattern matching. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Hanna M. Dettki , Charley M. Wu , Bob Rehder

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) distillation aims to enhance small language models' (SLMs) reasoning by transferring multi-step reasoning capability from the larger teacher models. However, existing work underestimates rationale quality, focusing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jianzhi Yan , Le Liu , Youcheng Pan , Shiwei Chen , Yang Xiang , Buzhou Tang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in vision language models (VLMs) is crucial for improving interpretability and trustworthiness. However, current training recipes lack robust CoT reasoning data, relying on datasets dominated by short…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-22 Ruohong Zhang , Bowen Zhang , Yanghao Li , Haotian Zhang , Zhiqing Sun , Zhe Gan , Yinfei Yang , Ruoming Pang , Yiming Yang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing implementations, such as in-context learning and fine-tuning, remain costly and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Li Li , Ziyi Wang , Yongliang Wu , Jianfei Cai , Xu Yang