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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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances large language models (LLMs) by decomposing complex problems into step-by-step solutions, improving performance on reasoning tasks. However, current CoT disclosure policies vary widely across…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2025-03-20 Yihang Chen , Haikang Deng , Kaiqiao Han , Qingyue Zhao

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning generated by large language models (LLMs) is often unfaithful: intermediate steps can be logically inconsistent or fail to reflect the causal relationship leading to the final answer. Despite extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Fuxin Wang , Amr Alazali , Yiqiao Zhong

Detecting harmful AI actions is important as AI agents gain adoption. Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one method widely used to detect adversarial attacks and AI misalignment. However, attackers and misaligned models might evade CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Shiyuan Guo , Henry Sleight , Fabien Roger

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for causal and counterfactual reasoning, yet their reliability in real-world policy evaluation remains underexplored. We construct a benchmark of 40 empirical policy evaluation cases drawn…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Yanjie He

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

This study investigates the internal information flow of large language models (LLMs) while performing chain-of-thought (CoT) style reasoning. Specifically, with a particular interest in the faithfulness of the CoT explanation to LLMs'…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Keito Kudo , Yoichi Aoki , Tatsuki Kuribayashi , Shusaku Sone , Masaya Taniguchi , Ana Brassard , Keisuke Sakaguchi , Kentaro Inui

Most work interpreting reasoning models studies only a single chain-of-thought (CoT), yet these models define distributions over many possible CoTs. We argue that studying a single sample is inadequate for understanding causal influence and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Uzay Macar , Paul C. Bogdan , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Neel Nanda

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring offers a unique opportunity for AI safety, this opportunity could be lost through shifts in training practices or model architecture. To help preserve monitorability, we propose a pragmatic way to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Scott Emmons , Roland S. Zimmermann , David K. Elson , Rohin Shah

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manqing Liu , David Williams-King , Ida Caspary , Linh Le , Hannes Whittingham , Puria Radmard , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young

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

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is as important as predictive accuracy. Extended reasoning via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Robert Welch , Emir Konuk , Kevin Smith

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrably enhanced the performance of Large Language Models on tasks requiring multi-step inference. This success has led to widespread claims of emergent reasoning capabilities in these models. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jintian Shao , Yiming Cheng

Chain-of-thought (CoT) is a method that enables language models to handle complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler steps. Despite its success, the underlying mechanics of CoT are not yet fully understood. In an attempt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Yingcong Li , Kartik Sreenivasan , Angeliki Giannou , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision can substantially improve transformer performance, yet the mechanisms by which models learn to follow and benefit from CoT remain poorly understood. We investigate these learning dynamics through the lens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Zihan Pengmei , Costas Mavromatis , Zhengyuan Shen , Yunyi Zhang , Vassilis N. Ioannidis , Huzefa Rangwala

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have popularized the chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm, in which models produce explicit reasoning steps in natural language. Although this approach improves interpretability and facilitates…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 José I. Orlicki

The chain-of-thought (CoT) paradigm uses the elicitation of step-by-step rationales as a proxy for reasoning, gradually refining the model's latent representation of a solution. However, it remains unclear just how early a Large Language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-20 Joey David

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is known to improve Large Language Models both empirically and in terms of theoretical approximation power. However, our understanding of the inner workings and conditions of apparition of CoT capabilities…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Vivien Cabannes , Charles Arnal , Wassim Bouaziz , Alice Yang , Francois Charton , Julia Kempe

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, conventional CoT relies on explicitly verbalized intermediate steps, which constrains its broader…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Xinghao Chen , Anhao Zhao , Heming Xia , Xuan Lu , Hanlin Wang , Yanjun Chen , Wei Zhang , Jian Wang , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen