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The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and Reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps. This work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-16 Yang Li , Zhichen Dong , Yuhan Sun , Weixun Wang , Shaopan Xiong , Yijia Luo , Jiashun Liu , Han Lu , Jiamang Wang , Wenbo Su , Bo Zheng , Junchi Yan

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Bohan Liu , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang

In this work, we propose Reinforced Functional Token Tuning (RFTT), a novel reinforced fine-tuning framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with self-play learn-to-reason capabilities. Unlike prior prompt-driven reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Kongcheng Zhang , Qi Yao , Baisheng Lai , Jiaxing Huang , Wenkai Fang , Dacheng Tao , Mingli Song , Shunyu Liu

Large reasoning models achieve strong performance by scaling inference-time chain-of-thought, but this paradigm suffers from quadratic cost, context length limits, and degraded reasoning due to lost-in-the-middle effects. Iterative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Yuchen Yan , Liang Jiang , Jin Jiang , Shuaicheng Li , Zujie Wen , Zhiqiang Zhang , Jun Zhou , Jian Shao , Yueting Zhuang , Yongliang Shen

Reasoning in Large Language Models incurs significant inference-time compute, yet the token-level information structure of reasoning traces remains underexplored. We observe that reasoning tokens split into two functional types: low-entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Zhenyu Zhao , Sander Land , Daniel M. Bikel , Waseem Alshikh

Standard training pipelines for large language models (LLMs) are typically unidirectional, progressing from pre-training to post-training. However, the potential for a bidirectional process--where insights from post-training retroactively…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Junjie Huang , Jiarui Qin , Di Yin , Weiwen Liu , Yong Yu , Xing Sun , Weinan Zhang

Large reasoning models exhibit long chain-of-thought reasoning with complex strategies such as backtracking and self-verification. Yet, these capabilities typically require resource-intensive post-training. We investigate whether such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yunxiang Zhang , Muhammad Khalifa , Lechen Zhang , Xin Liu , Ayoung Lee , Xinliang Frederick Zhang , Farima Fatahi Bayat , Lu Wang

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong reasoning capabilities but typically require expensive post-training to reach high performance. Recent test-time alignment methods offer a lightweight alternative, but have been explored mainly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Arushi Rai , Qiang Zhang , Hanqing Zeng , Yunkai Zhang , Dipesh Tamboli , Xiangjun Fan , Zhuokai Zhao , Lizhu Zhang

Scaling large language models by increasing parameters and training data is increasingly constrained by limited high-quality corpora and rising communication costs. This work explores an alternative axis: increasing per-token computation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-11 Boyi Zeng , Yiqin Hao , He Li , Shixiang Song , Feichen Song , Zitong Wang , Siyuan Huang , Yi Xu , ZiWei He , Xinbing Wang , Zhouhan Lin

Reasoning training incentivizes LLMs to produce long chains of thought (long CoT), which among other things, allows them to explore solution strategies with self-checking. This results in higher accuracy, but inflates context length,…

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning, yet their efficiency is limited by the surging cognitive overhead of long thought traces. In this paper, we propose LightThinker, a method that enables LLMs to dynamically compress…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Yuqi Zhu , Jintian Zhang , Zhenjie Wan , Yujie Luo , Shuofei Qiao , Zhengke Gui , Da Zheng , Lei Liang , Huajun Chen , Ningyu Zhang

Reasoning large language models achieve impressive test-time scaling by thinking for longer, but this performance gain comes at significant compute cost. Directly limiting test-time budget hurts overall performance, but not all problems are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Menghua Wu , Cai Zhou , Stephen Bates , Tommi Jaakkola

Carefully engineered system prompts play a critical role in guiding the behavior of LLM agents, but their considerable length introduces significant drawbacks, including increased inference latency, higher computational cost, and reduced…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Jiancheng Dong , Pengyue Jia , Jingyu Peng , Maolin Wang , Yuhao Wang , Lixin Su , Xin Sun , Shuaiqiang Wang , Dawei Yin , Xiangyu Zhao

Large reasoning models (LRMs) substantially outperform their base LLM counterparts on challenging reasoning benchmarks, yet it remains poorly understood where base models go wrong during token-by-token generation and how to narrow this gap…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Changshuo Shen , Leheng Sheng , Yuxin Chen , An Zhang , Xiang Wang

Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) has become a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs); however, the performance gains often come with a substantial increase in reasoning budget. Recent studies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jie Cao , Tianwei Lin , Zhenxuan Fan , Bo Yuan , Ziyuan Zhao , Rolan Yan , Wenqiao Zhang , Siliang Tang

Standard chain-of-thought reasoning generates a solution in a single forward pass, committing irrevocably to each token and lacking a mechanism to recover from early errors. We introduce Inference-Time Rethinking, a generative framework…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-09 Deqian Kong , Minglu Zhao , Aoyang Qin , Bo Pang , Chenxin Tao , David Hartmann , Edouardo Honig , Dehong Xu , Amit Kumar , Matt Sarte , Chuan Li , Jianwen Xie , Ying Nian Wu

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly advanced performance on complex tasks, yet their tendency to overthink introduces inefficiencies. This study investigates the internal mechanisms of reinforcement learning (RL)-trained LRMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rongzhi Zhu , Yi Liu , Zequn Sun , Yiwei Wang , Wei Hu

Recent advances in Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have made real-time, streaming spoken interaction increasingly practical. In this setting, reasoning quality and responsiveness are tightly coupled: delaying reasoning until the speech…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhiyuan Song , Weici Zhao , Yang Xiao , Suhao Yu , Cheng Zhu , Jiatao Gu

Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable…

Chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) has the potential to improve the explainability of language model reasoning. But CoT can also systematically misrepresent the factors influencing models' behavior -- for example, rationalizing answers in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 James Chua , Edward Rees , Hunar Batra , Samuel R. Bowman , Julian Michael , Ethan Perez , Miles Turpin