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The use of continuous instead of discrete tokens during the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) phase of reasoning LLMs has garnered attention recently, based on the intuition that a continuous mixture of discrete tokens could simulate a superposition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Natasha Butt , Ariel Kwiatkowski , Ismail Labiad , Julia Kempe , Yann Ollivier

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has widely enhanced mathematical reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but it still remains challenging for extending it to multimodal domains. Existing works either adopt a similar textual reasoning for image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xinyan Chen , Renrui Zhang , Dongzhi Jiang , Aojun Zhou , Shilin Yan , Weifeng Lin , Hongsheng Li

The Extended Church-Turing Thesis (ECTT) posits that all effective information processing, including unbounded and non-uniform interactive computations, can be described in terms of interactive Turing machines with advice. Does this…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-12 Jiří Wiedermann , Jan van Leeuwen

Recent theoretical work has identified surprisingly simple reasoning problems, such as checking if two nodes in a graph are connected or simulating finite-state machines, that are provably unsolvable by standard transformers that answer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-15 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts large language models' (LLMs) performance on complex tasks but faces two key limitations: a lack of reliability when solely relying on LLM-generated reasoning chains and lower reasoning performance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Feiyang Li , Peng Fang , Zhan Shi , Arijit Khan , Fang Wang , Weihao Wang , Xin Zhang , Yongjian Cui

Whether intermediate reasoning is computationally useful or merely explanatory depends on whether chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contain task-relevant information. We present a mechanistic causal analysis of CoT on GSM8K using activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Houman Mehrafarin , Amit Parekh , Ioannis Konstas

We contribute to the study of formal languages that can be recognized by transformer encoders. We focus on two self-attention mechanisms: (1) UHAT (Unique Hard Attention Transformers) and (2) AHAT (Average Hard Attention Transformers). UHAT…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-09 Pablo Barcelo , Alexander Kozachinskiy , Anthony Widjaja Lin , Vladimir Podolskii

The chain-of-though (CoT) prompting methods were successful in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks thanks to their ability to unveil the underlying complex reasoning processes. Such reasoning processes typically exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Ziqi Jin , Wei Lu

Large transformer models have achieved state-of-the-art results in numerous natural language processing tasks. Among the pivotal components of the transformer architecture, the attention mechanism plays a crucial role in capturing token…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Yichuan Deng , Zhao Song , Kaijun Yuan , Tianyi Zhou

The benchmark for computation is typically given as Turing computability; the ability for a computation to be performed by a Turing Machine. Many languages exploit (indirect) encodings of Turing Machines to demonstrate their ability to…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2014-10-29 Thomas Given-Wilson

Human cognition typically involves thinking through abstract, fluid concepts rather than strictly using discrete linguistic tokens. Current reasoning models, however, are constrained to reasoning within the boundaries of human language,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Zhen Zhang , Xuehai He , Weixiang Yan , Ao Shen , Chenyang Zhao , Shuohang Wang , Yelong Shen , Xin Eric Wang

Transformers, the backbone of modern large language models (LLMs), face inherent architectural limitations that impede their reasoning capabilities. Unlike recurrent networks, Transformers lack recurrent connections, confining them to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Chenyu You

Prompt Engineering has garnered significant attention for enhancing the performance of large language models across a multitude of tasks. Techniques such as the Chain-of-Thought not only bolster task performance but also delineate a clear…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Wei Jie Yeo , Ranjan Satapathy , Rick Siow Mong Goh , Erik Cambria

Transformers (Vaswani et al., 2017) have brought a remarkable improvement in the performance of neural machine translation (NMT) systems but they could be surprisingly vulnerable to noise. In this work, we try to investigate how noise…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-13 Peyman Passban , Puneeth S. M. Saladi , Qun Liu

Constraint Handling Rules (CHR) is a committed-choice declarative language which has been originally designed for writing constraint solvers and which is nowadays a general purpose language. CHR programs consist of multi-headed guarded…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2011-01-19 Cinzia Di Giusto , Maurizio Gabbrielli , Maria Chiara Meo

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

Graph transformers achieve strong results on molecular and long-range reasoning tasks, yet remain hampered by over-smoothing (the progressive collapse of node representations with depth) and attention entropy degeneration. We observe that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Dongxin Guo , Jikun Wu , Siu Ming Yiu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled transformer-based language models to excel at complex mathematics and multi-step planning. However, in standard decoder-only architectures, these reasoning steps are externalized in natural…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Wenquan Lu , Yuechuan Yang , Kyle Lee , Yanshu Li , Enqi Liu

Large language models exhibit high-level commonsense reasoning abilities, especially with enhancement methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT). However, we find these CoT-like methods lead to a considerable number of originally correct answers…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Chenhao Wang , Zhuoran Jin , Yubo Chen , Daojian Zeng , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Transformer architectures have led to remarkable progress in many state-of-art applications. However, despite their successes, modern transformers rely on the self-attention mechanism, whose time- and space-complexity is quadratic in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-13 Feyza Duman Keles , Pruthuvi Mahesakya Wijewardena , Chinmay Hegde