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The viability of chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring hinges on models being unable to reason effectively in their latent representations. Yet little is known about the limits of such latent reasoning in LLMs. We test these limits by studying…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Yi Xu , Philipp Jettkant , Laura Ruis

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a foundational technique for eliciting reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the robustness of this approach to corruptions in intermediate reasoning steps remains poorly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Ashwath Vaithinathan Aravindan , Mayank Kejriwal

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

Explicit Chain-of-Thought improves the reasoning performance of large language models but often incurs high inference cost due to verbose token-level traces. While recent approaches reduce this overhead via concise prompting or step…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-09 Yunlong Chu , Minglai Shao , Yuhang Liu , Bing Hao , Yumeng Lin , Jialu Wang , Ruijie Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Tergel Munkhbat , Namgyu Ho , Seo Hyun Kim , Yongjin Yang , Yujin Kim , Se-Young Yun

Language models trained via outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to reason using chain-of-thought (CoT) have shown remarkable performance. Monitoring such a model's CoT may allow us to understand its intentions and detect potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Arun Jose

While chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is an appealing AI safety defense, recent work on "unfaithfulness" has cast doubt on its reliability. These findings highlight an important failure mode, particularly when CoT acts as a post-hoc…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Scott Emmons , Erik Jenner , David K. Elson , Rif A. Saurous , Senthooran Rajamanoharan , Heng Chen , Irhum Shafkat , Rohin Shah

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) often rely on long chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to solve complex tasks. While effective, these trajectories are frequently inefficient, leading to high latency from excessive token generation, or unstable…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a critical technique in enhancing the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), and latent reasoning methods have been proposed to accelerate the inefficient token-level reasoning chain. We notice that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Fangwei Zhu , Zhifang Sui

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

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Xiaomin Li , Zhou Yu , Zhiwei Zhang , Xupeng Chen , Ziji Zhang , Yingying Zhuang , Narayanan Sadagopan , Anurag Beniwal

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods offer a token-efficient alternative to explicit CoT reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but a persistent performance gap has limited their adoption. We identify a core latent instability issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Xilin Wei , Xiaoran Liu , Yuhang Zang , Xiaoyi Dong , Yuhang Cao , Jiaqi Wang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

Large language models (LLMs) excel at complex reasoning but can still exhibit harmful behaviors. Current alignment strategies typically embed safety into model weights, making these controls implicit, static, and difficult to modify. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-15 Xuanming Zhang , Yuxuan Chen , Samuel Yeh , Sharon Li

As large language models become increasingly capable, there is growing concern that they may develop reasoning processes that are encoded or hidden from human oversight. To investigate whether current interpretability techniques can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Ching Fang , Samuel Marks

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

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

Linguistic steganography (LS) conceals the presence of communication by embedding secret information into a text. How to generate a high-quality text carrying secret information is a key problem. With the widespread application of deep…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-04-26 Xiaoyan Zheng , Hanzhou Wu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the reasoning abilities of large language models. However, recent studies have shown that models can still perform complex reasoning tasks even when the CoT is replaced with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-09 Aryasomayajula Ram Bharadwaj

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning provides a significant performance uplift to LLMs by enabling planning, exploration, and deliberation of their actions. CoT is also a powerful tool for monitoring the behaviours of these agents: when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nathaniel Mitrani Hadida , Sassan Bhanji , Cameron Tice , Puria Radmard