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Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is useful for monitoring language models only when the reasoning trace faithfully reflects the computation that produces the final answer. However, models can rely on prompt-to-answer shortcuts that bypass…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jinghan Jia , Joe Benton , Eric Easley

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting boosts Large Language Models accuracy on multi-step tasks, yet whether the generated "thoughts" reflect the true internal reasoning process is unresolved. We present the first feature-level causal study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Xi Chen , Aske Plaat , Niki van Stein

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proposed as a transparency mechanism for large language models in safety-critical deployments, yet its effectiveness depends on faithfulness (whether models accurately verbalize the factors that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Richard J. Young

Although Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has achieved remarkable success in enhancing the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs), the mechanism of CoT remains a ``black box''. Even if the correct answers can frequently be obtained,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Jiarun Fu , Lizhong Ding , Hao Li , Pengqi Li , Qiuning Wei , Xu Chen

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been widely adopted to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of CoT reasoning is inconsistent across tasks with different reasoning types. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Yue Wan , Xiaowei Jia , Xiang Lorraine Li

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces promise transparency for reasoning language models, but prior work shows they are not always faithful reflections of internal computation. This raises challenges for oversight: practitioners may misinterpret…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Jiazheng Li , Andreas Damianou , J Rosser , José Luis Redondo García , Konstantina Palla

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yufeng Zhang , Xuepeng Wang , Lingxiang Wu , Jinqiao Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) outputs let us read a model's step-by-step reasoning. Since any long, serial reasoning process must pass through this textual trace, the quality of the CoT is a direct window into what the model is thinking. This…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Austin Meek , Eitan Sprejer , Iván Arcuschin , Austin J. Brockmeier , Steven Basart

Recent findings suggest that misaligned models may exhibit deceptive behavior, raising concerns about output trustworthiness. Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a promising tool for alignment monitoring: when models articulate their reasoning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Artur Zolkowski , Wen Xing , David Lindner , Florian Tramèr , Erik Jenner

Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model's CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effectiveness of such monitoring hinges on CoTs faithfully…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a common technique for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extended reasoning is often unnecessary and substantially increases token usage. As such, a key question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful tool for improving large language model performance on complex tasks, but recent work shows that reasoning steps often fail to causally influence the final answer, creating brittle…

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one of the most promising tools we have for detecting model misbehavior, but its effectiveness depends on models faithfully externalizing their reasoning. Motivated by this vulnerability, we study…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Reilly Haskins , Bilal Chughtai , Joshua Engels

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Lennart Meincke , Ethan Mollick , Lilach Mollick , Dan Shapiro

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

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning has demonstrated remarkable deep reasoning capabilities in both large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). However, its reliability is often undermined by the accumulation of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Zijun Chen , Wenbo Hu , Richang Hong

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is proposed as a method for overseeing the internal reasoning of language-model agents. Prior work has shown that when models are explicitly informed that their reasoning is being monitored, or are…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Thomas Jiralerspong , Flemming Kondrup , Yoshua Bengio
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