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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) 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) 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) prompting plays an indispensable role in endowing large language models (LLMs) with complex reasoning capabilities. However, CoT currently faces two fundamental challenges: (1) Sufficiency, which ensures that the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Xiangning Yu , Zhuohan Wang , Linyi Yang , Haoxuan Li , Anjie Liu , Xiao Xue , Jun Wang , Mengyue Yang

The Chain-of-Thought (CoT) paradigm has emerged as a critical approach for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, despite their widespread adoption and success, CoT methods often exhibit instability…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Yu Wang , Shiwan Zhao , Zhihu Wang , Heyuan Huang , Ming Fan , Yubo Zhang , Zhixing Wang , Haijun Wang , Ting Liu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enables large language models to solve complex reasoning problems by generating intermediate steps. However, confined by its inherent single-pass and sequential generation process, CoT heavily relies on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-11-03 Jingyuan Qi , Zhiyang Xu , Ying Shen , Minqian Liu , Di Jin , Qifan Wang , Lifu Huang

Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models' (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Soochan Lee , Gunhee Kim

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting demonstrates varying performance under different reasoning tasks. Previous work attempts to evaluate it but falls short in providing an in-depth analysis of patterns that influence the CoT. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiachun Li , Pengfei Cao , Yubo Chen , Jiexin Xu , Huaijun Li , Xiaojian Jiang , Kang Liu , Jun Zhao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) holds a significant place in augmenting the reasoning performance for large language models (LLMs). While some studies focus on improving CoT accuracy through methods like retrieval enhancement, yet a rigorous…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Lijie Hu , Liang Liu , Shu Yang , Xin Chen , Hongru Xiao , Mengdi Li , Pan Zhou , Muhammad Asif Ali , Di Wang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become a widely used strategy for improving large language and multimodal model performance. However, it is still an open question under which settings CoT systematically reduces performance. In this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Ryan Liu , Jiayi Geng , Addison J. Wu , Ilia Sucholutsky , Tania Lombrozo , Thomas L. Griffiths

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Mingyu Jin , Qinkai Yu , Dong Shu , Haiyan Zhao , Wenyue Hua , Yanda Meng , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du

Chain of thought (CoT) elicits reasoning in large language models by explicitly generating intermediate tokens. In contrast, latent thought reasoning operates directly in the continuous latent space, enabling computation beyond discrete…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Kevin Xu , Issei Sato

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting substantially improves the sample efficiency of transformers, reducing the complexity of tasks like parity learning from exponential to polynomial in the input length. However, generating explicit reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yixiao Huang , Hanlin Zhu , Zixuan Wang , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell , Somayeh Sojoudi , Song Mei

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is a technique that guides Large Language Models (LLMs) to decompose complex tasks into multi-step reasoning through intermediate steps in natural language form. Briefly, CoT enables LLMs to think step by step.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Caoyun Fan , Jidong Tian , Yitian Li , Wenqing Chen , Hao He , Yaohui Jin

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

Recent studies have discovered that Chain-of-Thought prompting (CoT) can dramatically improve the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly when dealing with complex tasks involving mathematics or reasoning. Despite the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-27 Guhao Feng , Bohang Zhang , Yuntian Gu , Haotian Ye , Di He , Liwei Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. We find existing fine-tuning datasets frequently suffer from the "answer right but reasoning wrong" probelm, where…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Zihang Li , Yuhang Wang , Yikun Zong , Wenhan Yu , Xiaokun Yuan , Runhan Jiang , Zirui Liu , Tong Yang , Arthur Jiang

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

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting boosts Language Models' (LM) performance on a gamut of complex reasoning tasks, the generated reasoning chain does not necessarily reflect how the model arrives at the answer (aka. faithfulness). We…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-22 Qing Lyu , Shreya Havaldar , Adam Stein , Li Zhang , Delip Rao , Eric Wong , Marianna Apidianaki , Chris Callison-Burch