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Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, especially when guided by explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that verbalizes intermediate steps. While CoT improves both interpretability and accuracy,…

Long chains of thought (CoT) from current language models frequently contain logical gaps and unjustified leaps, limiting the gains from additional test-time compute. Improving reasoning quality directly would require process reward models,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Jingchu Gai , Guanning Zeng , Christina Baek , Chen Wu , J. Zico Kolter , Andrej Risteski , Aditi Raghunathan

Recent impressive results from large reasoning models have been interpreted as a triumph of Chain of Thought (CoT), and especially of the process of training on CoTs sampled from base LLMs in order to help find new reasoning patterns. While…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Karthik Valmeekam , Vardhan Palod , Kaya Stechly , Atharva Gundawar , Subbarao Kambhampati

Despite the remarkable reasoning performance, eliciting the long chain-of-thought (CoT) ability in large language models (LLMs) typically requires costly reinforcement learning or supervised fine-tuning on high-quality distilled data. We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Zekai Zhao , Qi Liu , Kun Zhou , Zihan Liu , Yifei Shao , Zhiting Hu , Biwei Huang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become central to mathematical reasoning in large language models, yet models remain brittle to early errors: a single arithmetic slip or unjustified inference typically propagates uncorrected to an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-22 Saraswathy Amjith , Mihika Dusad , Neha Muramalla , Shweta Shah

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on code generation, but the mechanisms by which Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical and information-theoretic study of CoT…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Naizhu Jin , Zhong Li , Guang Yang , Tian Zhang , Qingkai Zeng

Recent advances in test-time scaling have enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to display sophisticated reasoning abilities via extended Chain-of-Thought (CoT) generation. Despite their potential, these Reasoning LLMs (RLMs) often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-21 Zhen Xiong , Yujun Cai , Zhecheng Li , Yiwei Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is widely applied to enhance the LLM capability in math, coding and reasoning tasks. However, its performance is limited for open-domain tasks, when there are no clearly defined reasoning steps or logical transitions.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Qingqing Gu , Dan Wang , Yue Zhao , Xiaoyu Wang , Zhonglin Jiang , Yong Chen , Hongyan Li , Luo Ji

Modern large language models rely on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to achieve impressive performance, yet the same mechanism can amplify deceptive alignment, situations in which a model appears aligned while covertly pursuing misaligned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jiaming Ji , Wenqi Chen , Kaile Wang , Donghai Hong , Sitong Fang , Boyuan Chen , Jiayi Zhou , Juntao Dai , Sirui Han , Yike Guo , Yaodong Yang

Chain-of-thought emerges as a promising technique for eliciting reasoning capabilities from Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it does not always improve task performance or accurately represent reasoning processes, leaving unresolved…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-13 Guangsheng Bao , Hongbo Zhang , Cunxiang Wang , Linyi Yang , Yue Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is an efficient prompting method that enables the reasoning ability of large language models by augmenting the query using multiple examples with multiple intermediate steps. Despite the empirical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Hongkang Li , Songtao Lu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xiaodong Cui , Meng Wang

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

Observability into the decision making of modern AI systems may be required to safely deploy increasingly capable agents. Monitoring the chain-of-thought (CoT) of today's reasoning models has proven effective for detecting misbehavior.…

Reasoning language models improve performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs), but this process can also increase harmful outputs in adversarial settings. In this work, we ask whether the long CoTs can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Yik Siu Chan , Zheng-Xin Yong , Stephen H. Bach

Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitors are LLM-based systems that analyze reasoning traces to detect when outputs may exhibit attributes of interest, such as test-hacking behavior during code generation. In this paper, we use information-theoretic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Usman Anwar , Tim Bakker , Dana Kianfar , Cristina Pinneri , Christos Louizos

Reasoning capability is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks, yet achieving reliable and scalable reasoning remains challenging. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become a mainstream approach, existing…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Honglin Lin , Qizhi Pei , Xin Gao , Zhuoshi Pan , Yu Li , Juntao Li , Conghui He , Lijun Wu

Despite the remarkable successes of large language models (LLMs), the underlying Transformer architecture has inherent limitations in handling complex reasoning tasks. Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a practical workaround,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xiang Zhang , Juntai Cao , Jiaqi Wei , Chenyu You , Dujian Ding

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning is a critical capability for large language models (LLMs), enabling them to tackle com- plex multi-step tasks. While base LLMs, pre-trained on general text corpora, often struggle with reasoning due to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Zijian Wang , Yanxiang Ma , Chang Xu

Getting language models to reason correctly about code requires training on data where each reasoning step can be checked. Current synthetic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training data often consists of plausible-sounding explanations generated by…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Shailja Thakur , Vaibhav Saxena , Rohan Kulkarni , Shivdeep Singh , Parameswaran Selvam , Hima Patel , Hiroshi Kanayama

Equipped with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive reasoning ability in various downstream tasks. Even so, suffering from hallucinations and the inability to access external knowledge, LLMs often come…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Keheng Wang , Feiyu Duan , Sirui Wang , Peiguang Li , Yunsen Xian , Chuantao Yin , Wenge Rong , Zhang Xiong