English
Related papers

Related papers: When does Chain-of-Thought Help: A Markovian Persp…

200 papers

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a simple and effective way to elicit step-by-step solutions from large language models (LLMs). However, CoT reasoning can be unstable across runs on long, multi-step problems, leading to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Shuxu Chen , Yitian Zhou , Jiaquan Zhang , Haoyu Bian , Aming Wu , Sungyoung Lee , Chaoning Zhang , Hyundong Shin

Chain-of-thought (CoT) decoding enables language models to improve reasoning performance at the cost of high generation latency in decoding. Recent proposals have explored variants of contemplation tokens, a term we introduce that refers to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jeffrey Cheng , Benjamin Van Durme

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

Instructing the model to generate a sequence of intermediate steps, a.k.a., a chain of thought (CoT), is a highly effective method to improve the accuracy of large language models (LLMs) on arithmetics and symbolic reasoning tasks. However,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-24 Zhiyuan Li , Hong Liu , Denny Zhou , Tengyu Ma

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Bohan Liu , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang

In this paper, we introduce Concise Chain-of-Thought (CCoT) prompting. We compared standard CoT and CCoT prompts to see how conciseness impacts response length and correct-answer accuracy. We evaluated this using GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 with a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-17 Matthew Renze , Erhan Guven

Reasoning methods, best exemplified by the well-known Chain-of-Thought (CoT), empower the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by eliciting them to solve complex tasks in a step-by-step manner. Although they are achieving…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-24 Leonardo Ranaldi , Giulia Pucci , Federico Ranaldi , Elena Sofia Ruzzetti , Fabio Massimo Zanzotto

Whether intermediate reasoning is computationally useful or merely explanatory depends on whether chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contain task-relevant information. We present a mechanistic causal analysis of CoT on GSM8K using activation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Houman Mehrafarin , Amit Parekh , Ioannis Konstas

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to break down complex problems into interpretable intermediate steps, significantly enhancing model transparency and performance in reasoning tasks. However, conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Junda Wu , Yuxin Xiong , Xintong Li , Sheldon Yu , Zhengmian Hu , Tong Yu , Rui Wang , Xiang Chen , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley

With the rapid advancement of large reasoning models, long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance on complex tasks. However, this often comes with a significant increase in token usage. In this paper, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Ruiqi Zhang , Changyi Xiao , Yixin Cao

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in unlocking the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although CoT prompting enhances reasoning, its verbosity imposes substantial computational overhead.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Yifan Wang , Shiyu Li , Peiming Li , Xiaochen Yang , Yang Tang , Zheng Wei

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-thoughts (CoT) requires large language models (LLMs) to generate intermediate steps before reaching the final answer, and has been proven effective to help LLMs solve complex reasoning tasks. However, the inner mechanism of CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Fangwei Zhu , Peiyi Wang , Zhifang Sui

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used method to improve the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). More recently, CoT has been leveraged in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to transfer reasoning capability from a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Cong-Thanh Do , Rama Doddipatla , Kate Knill

While Chain-of-Thought prompting is popular in reasoning tasks, its application to Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is under-explored. Motivated by multi-step reasoning of LLMs, we propose Coarse-to-Fine…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Hoang H. Nguyen , Ye Liu , Chenwei Zhang , Tao Zhang , Philip S. Yu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model's CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effectiveness of such monitoring hinges on CoTs faithfully…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has emerged as a powerful technique for enhancing language model's reasoning capabilities. However, generating long and correct CoT trajectories is challenging. Recent studies have demonstrated that Looped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-13 Qifan Yu , Zhenyu He , Sijie Li , Xun Zhou , Jun Zhang , Jingjing Xu , Di He

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been widely recognized for its ability to enhance reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs). However, our study reveals a surprising contradiction to this prevailing perspective within the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Tianshi Zheng , Yixiang Chen , Chengxi Li , Chunyang Li , Qing Zong , Haochen Shi , Baixuan Xu , Yangqiu Song , Ginny Y. Wong , Simon See

Multi-step reasoning ability of large language models is crucial in tasks such as math and tool utilization. Current researches predominantly focus on enhancing model performance in these multi-step reasoning tasks through fine-tuning with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Yuli Qiu , Jiashu Yao , Heyan Huang , Yuhang Guo

Chain-of-thought and more broadly test-time compute are known to augment the expressive capabilities of language models and have led to major innovations in reasoning. Motivated by this success, this paper explores latent chain-of-thought…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Carson Dudley , Samet Oymak