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We study how to extend chain-of-thought (CoT) beyond language to better handle multimodal reasoning. While CoT helps LLMs and VLMs articulate intermediate steps, its text-only form often fails on vision-intensive problems where key…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yifei Shao , Kun Zhou , Ziming Xu , Mohammad Atif Quamar , Shibo Hao , Zhen Wang , Zhiting Hu , Biwei Huang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to empirically improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on various question answering tasks. While understanding why CoT prompting is effective is crucial to ensuring that this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-26 Skyler Wu , Eric Meng Shen , Charumathi Badrinath , Jiaqi Ma , Himabindu Lakkaraju

Large reasoning models (LRMs) spend substantial test-time compute on long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, but what *characterizes* an effective CoT remains unclear. While prior work reports gains from lengthening CoTs and increasing review…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Yunzhen Feng , Julia Kempe , Cheng Zhang , Parag Jain , Anthony Hartshorn

Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting have enabled large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning. However, the explainability of such reasoning remains limited, with prior work primarily focusing on local…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Sheldon Yu , Yuxin Xiong , Junda Wu , Xintong Li , Tong Yu , Xiang Chen , Ritwik Sinha , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley

Chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales, which provide step-by-step reasoning to derive final answers, benefit LLMs in both inference and training. Incorporating rationales, either by generating them before answering during inference, or by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Wenhang Shi , Shuqing Bian , Yiren Chen , Xinyi Zhang , Zhe Zhao , Pengfei Hu , Wei Lu , Xiaoyong Du

Learning complex functions that involve multi-step reasoning poses a significant challenge for standard supervised learning from input-output examples. Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision, which provides intermediate reasoning steps together…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-23 Awni Altabaa , Omar Montasser , John Lafferty

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly advanced task-solving capabilities in natural language processing with large language models. Unlike standard prompting, CoT encourages the model to generate intermediate reasoning steps,…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning exposes the intermediate thinking process of large language models (LLMs), yet verifying those traces at scale remains unsolved. In response, we introduce the idea of decision pivots-minimal, verifiable…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Dongkyu Cho , Amy B. Z. Zhang , Bilel Fehri , Sheng Wang , Rumi Chunara , Hengrui Cai , Rui Song

Current Large Language Models (LLMs), especially Large Reasoning Models, can generate Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning traces to illustrate how they produce final outputs, thereby facilitating trust calibration for users. However, these CoT…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Shiwei Chen , Niruthikka Sritharan , Xiaolin Wen , Chenxi Zhang , Xingbo Wang , Yong Wang

Human conversation is organized by an implicit chain of thoughts that manifests as timed speech acts. Capturing this causal pathway is key to building natural full-duplex interactive systems. We introduce a framework that enables reasoning…

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful approach to enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing implementations, such as in-context learning and fine-tuning, remain costly and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Li Li , Ziyi Wang , Yongliang Wu , Jianfei Cai , Xu Yang

The ability to perform Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning marks a major milestone for multimodal models (MMs), enabling them to solve complex visual reasoning problems. Yet a critical question remains: is such reasoning genuinely grounded in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-12-10 Jusheng Zhang , Kaitong Cai , Xiaoyang Guo , Sidi Liu , Qinhan Lv , Ruiqi Chen , Jing Yang , Yijia Fan , Xiaofei Sun , Jian Wang , Ziliang Chen , Liang Lin , Keze Wang

As large language models (LLMs) perform more difficult tasks, it becomes harder to verify the correctness and safety of their behavior. One approach to help with this issue is to prompt LLMs to externalize their reasoning, e.g., by having…

Many reasoning techniques for large multimodal models adapt language model approaches, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, which express reasoning as word sequences. While effective for text, these methods are suboptimal for…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-25 Tan-Hanh Pham , Chris Ngo

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models, the faithfulness of the generated rationales remains an open problem for model interpretability. We propose a novel theoretical lens for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Elija Perrier

Few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance in improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). While theoretical investigations have been conducted to understand CoT, the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Yingqian Cui , Pengfei He , Xianfeng Tang , Qi He , Chen Luo , Jiliang Tang , Yue Xing

Chain of thought (CoT) fine-tuning aims to endow large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities by training them on curated reasoning traces. It leverages both supervised and reinforced fine-tuning to cultivate human-like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Xiaoshu Chen , Sihang Zhou , Ke Liang , Duanyang Yuan , Haoyuan Chen , Xiaoyu Sun , Lingyuan Meng , Xinwang Liu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing large language models' capabilities by generating intermediate reasoning steps for complex tasks. A common practice for equipping LLMs with reasoning is to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Harsh Chaudhari , Ethan Rathbun , Hanna Foerster , Jamie Hayes , Matthew Jagielski , Milad Nasr , Ilia Shumailov , Alina Oprea

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning, which breaks down complex tasks into intermediate reasoning steps, has significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) on challenging tasks. However, the detailed reasoning process in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-20 Yingqian Cui , Pengfei He , Jingying Zeng , Hui Liu , Xianfeng Tang , Zhenwei Dai , Yan Han , Chen Luo , Jing Huang , Zhen Li , Suhang Wang , Yue Xing , Jiliang Tang , Qi He