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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency across diverse tasks, exhibiting emergent properties such as semantic prompt comprehension, In-Context Learning (ICL), and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. Despite their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Yuling Jiao , Yanming Lai , Huazhen Lin , Wensen Ma , Houduo Qi , Defeng Sun

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

With the remarkable success of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) in perception tasks, enhancing their complex reasoning capabilities has emerged as a critical research focus. Existing models still suffer from challenges such as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Wenxin Zhu , Andong Chen , Yuchen Song , Kehai Chen , Conghui Zhu , Ziyan Chen , Tiejun Zhao

Large Language Models (LLMs) solve many reasoning tasks via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, but smaller models (about 7 to 8B parameters) still struggle with multi-step reasoning under tight compute and token budgets. Existing test time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Sagnik Chatterjee , Atharva Patil , Sricharan Ramesh

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a de-facto standard technique to elicit reasoning-like responses from large language models (LLMs), allowing them to spell out individual steps before giving a final answer. While the resemblance to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Gregor Bachmann , Yichen Jiang , Seyed Mohsen Moosavi Dezfooli , Moin Nabi

Large language models (LLMs) can perform complex reasoning by generating intermediate reasoning steps. Providing these steps for prompting demonstrations is called chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. CoT prompting has two major paradigms. One…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-10-10 Zhuosheng Zhang , Aston Zhang , Mu Li , Alex Smola

While Chain-of-Thought prompting is popular in reasoning tasks, its application to Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is under-explored. Motivated by multi-step reasoning of LLMs, we propose Coarse-to-Fine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Hoang H. Nguyen , Ye Liu , Chenwei Zhang , Tao Zhang , Philip S. Yu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enhances performance of large language models, but questions remain about whether these reasoning traces faithfully reflect the internal processes of the model. We present the first comprehensive study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Sriram Balasubramanian , Samyadeep Basu , Soheil Feizi

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

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) 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

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

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 studies have discovered that Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) can dramatically improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when dealing with complex tasks involving mathematics or reasoning. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guhao Feng , Bohang Zhang , Yuntian Gu , Haotian Ye , Di He , Liwei Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can effectively elicit complex multi-step reasoning from Large Language Models~(LLMs). For example, by simply adding CoT instruction ``Let's think step-by-step'' to each input query of MultiArith dataset,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Jiuhai Chen , Lichang Chen , Heng Huang , Tianyi Zhou

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) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), establishing itself as a primary approach to solving complex reasoning tasks. Existing CoT synthesis approaches usually focus on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-22 Xiaoxue Cheng , Junyi Li , Wayne Xin Zhao , Ji-Rong Wen

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have led to new possibilities in terms of problem-solving, through the devising of a natural language thought process prior to answering a query. While their capabilities are well known across mathematics and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Armel Zebaze , Rachel Bawden , Benoît Sagot

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks, where models need to reason over extensive input contexts to aggregate target information. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Dawei Zhu , Xiyu Wei , Guangxiang Zhao , Wenhao Wu , Haosheng Zou , Junfeng Ran , Xun Wang , Lin Sun , Xiangzheng Zhang , Sujian Li