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Related papers: Do Latent-CoT Models Think Step-by-Step? A Mechani…

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As language models are increasingly deployed for complex autonomous tasks, their ability to reason accurately over longer horizons becomes critical. An essential component of this ability is planning and managing a long, complex…

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

High-quality chain-of-thought has demonstrated strong potential for unlocking the reasoning capabilities of large language models. However, current paradigms typically treat the reasoning process as an indivisible sequence, lacking an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-15 Yan Liu , Feng Zhang , Zhanyu Ma , Jun Xu , Jiuchong Gao , Jinghua Hao , Renqing He , Han Liu , Yangdong Deng

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting significantly enhances model reasoning, yet its internal mechanisms remain poorly understood. We analyze CoT's operational principles by reversely tracing information flow across decoding, projection, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Hao Yang , Qinghua Zhao , Lei Li , Lingyi Meng , Mengda Yu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting elicits large language models (LLMs) to produce a series of intermediate reasoning steps before arriving at the final answer. However, when transitioning to vision-language models (VLMs), their text-only…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-03-18 Jun Gao , Yongqi Li , Ziqiang Cao , Wenjie Li

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces are increasingly used both to improve language model capability and to audit model behavior, implicitly assuming that the visible trace remains synchronized with the computation that determines the answer. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Wenkai Li , Fan Yang , Ananya Hazarika , Shaunak A. Mehta , Koichi Onoue

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

This position paper argues that large language model (LLM) reasoning should be studied as latent-state trajectory formation rather than as faithful surface chain-of-thought (CoT). This matters because claims about faithfulness,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Wenshuo Wang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly rely on step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to improve task performance, particularly in high-resource languages such as English. While recent work has examined final-answer accuracy in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Raoyuan Zhao , Yihong Liu , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

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

As chain-of-thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kyle Cox , Darius Kianersi , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for enhancing the problem-solving capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the theoretical foundations of learning from CoT data remain underdeveloped, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Shai Shalev-Shwartz , Amnon Shashua

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yang , Ke Lin , Xing Yu

Recent works have shown that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting can elicit language models to solve complex reasoning tasks, step-by-step. However, prompt-based CoT methods are dependent on very large models such as GPT-3 175B which are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-14 Namgyu Ho , Laura Schmid , Se-Young Yun

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities through \emph{Chain-of-Thought} (CoT) prompting, which enables step-by-step intermediate reasoning. However, explicit CoT methods rely on discrete token-level…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Zhikang Chen , Sen Cui , Deheng Ye , Yu Zhang , Yatao Bian , Tingting Zhu

In enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), prior research primarily focuses on specific prompting techniques such as few-shot or zero-shot chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. These methods, while effective, often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-27 Xuezhi Wang , Denny Zhou

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

Large language models (LLMs), such as o1 from OpenAI, have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities. o1 generates a long chain-of-thought (LongCoT) before answering a question. LongCoT allows LLMs to analyze problems, devise plans,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Bo Pang , Hanze Dong , Jiacheng Xu , Silvio Savarese , Yingbo Zhou , Caiming Xiong

Chain-of-thought prompting (e.g., "Let's think step-by-step") primes large language models to verbalize rationalization for their predictions. While chain-of-thought can lead to dramatic performance gains, benefits appear to emerge only for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-04-17 Liunian Harold Li , Jack Hessel , Youngjae Yu , Xiang Ren , Kai-Wei Chang , Yejin Choi