English
Related papers

Related papers: Reasoning Models Struggle to Control their Chains …

200 papers

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proposed as a transparency mechanism for large language models in safety-critical deployments, yet its effectiveness depends on faithfulness (whether models accurately verbalize the factors that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-25 Richard J. Young

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) 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

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

This is the second in a series of short reports that seek to help business, education, and policy leaders understand the technical details of working with AI through rigorous testing. In this report, we investigate Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Lennart Meincke , Ethan Mollick , Lilach Mollick , Dan Shapiro

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

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) introduce new opportunities for safety monitoring through their Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, CoT is not always faithful to the model's final output, undermining its reliability as a monitoring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Maciej Chrabąszcz , Aleksander Szymczyk , Marcin Sendera , Tomasz Trzciński , Sebastian Cygert

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manqing Liu , David Williams-King , Ida Caspary , Linh Le , Hannes Whittingham , Puria Radmard , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as an effective approach for activating latent capabilities in LLMs. Interestingly, we observe that both CoT reasoning and self-training share the core objective: iteratively leveraging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Zongqian Wu , Baoduo Xu , Ruochen Cui , Mengmeng Zhan , Xiaofeng Zhu , Lei Feng

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) monitoring offers a unique opportunity for AI safety, this opportunity could be lost through shifts in training practices or model architecture. To help preserve monitorability, we propose a pragmatic way to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-29 Scott Emmons , Roland S. Zimmermann , David K. Elson , Rohin Shah

We present the surprising finding that a language model's reasoning capabilities can be improved by training on synthetic datasets of chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from more capable models, even when all of those traces lead to an incorrect…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Abhranil Chandra , Ayush Agrawal , Arian Hosseini , Sebastian Fischmeister , Rishabh Agarwal , Navin Goyal , Aaron Courville

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

We propose a variant of chain of thought (CoT) prompting called Program Trace Prompting that makes explanations more observable while preserving the power, generality and flexibility of CoT. In our approach, few-shot CoT demonstrations are…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-03 Cassandra A. Cohen , William W. Cohen

Chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision can substantially improve transformer performance, yet the mechanisms by which models learn to follow and benefit from CoT remain poorly understood. We investigate these learning dynamics through the lens…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Zihan Pengmei , Costas Mavromatis , Zhengyuan Shen , Yunyi Zhang , Vassilis N. Ioannidis , Huzefa Rangwala

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) reasoning has emerged as a key technique for eliciting complex reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Although interpretable, its dependence on natural language limits the model's expressive bandwidth. Continuous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Sharan Ramjee

Despite their strengths, large language models (LLMs) often fail to communicate their confidence accurately, making it difficult to assess when they might be wrong and limiting their reliability. In this work, we demonstrate that reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Dongkeun Yoon , Seungone Kim , Sohee Yang , Sunkyoung Kim , Soyeon Kim , Yongil Kim , Eunbi Choi , Yireun Kim , Minjoon Seo

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) via prompting is the de facto method for eliciting reasoning capabilities from large language models (LLMs). But for what kinds of tasks is this extra ``thinking'' really helpful? To analyze this, we conducted a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Zayne Sprague , Fangcong Yin , Juan Diego Rodriguez , Dongwei Jiang , Manya Wadhwa , Prasann Singhal , Xinyu Zhao , Xi Ye , Kyle Mahowald , Greg Durrett