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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). CoT explicitly encourages the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem, by providing a series…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-02 Boshi Wang , Sewon Min , Xiang Deng , Jiaming Shen , You Wu , Luke Zettlemoyer , Huan Sun

Large language models (LLMs) perform better when they produce step-by-step, "Chain-of-Thought" (CoT) reasoning before answering a question, but it is unclear if the stated reasoning is a faithful explanation of the model's actual reasoning…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a common technique for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extended reasoning is often unnecessary and substantially increases token usage. As such, a key question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

Generating a Chain of Thought (CoT) has been shown to consistently improve large language model (LLM) performance on a wide range of NLP tasks. However, prior work has mainly focused on logical reasoning tasks (e.g. arithmetic, commonsense…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-06 Omar Shaikh , Hongxin Zhang , William Held , Michael Bernstein , Diyi Yang

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong performance on many tasks by producing step-by-step reasoning before giving a final output, often referred to as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT). It is tempting to interpret these CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Miles Turpin , Julian Michael , Ethan Perez , Samuel R. Bowman

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) is an essential ingredient in effective usage of modern large language models, but our understanding of the reasoning strategies underlying these capabilities remains limited. While some prior works have…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Seongyun Lee , Seungone Kim , Minju Seo , Yongrae Jo , Dongyoung Go , Hyeonbin Hwang , Jinho Park , Xiang Yue , Sean Welleck , Graham Neubig , Moontae Lee , Minjoon Seo

Reasoning language models improve performance on complex tasks by generating long chains of thought (CoTs), but this process can also increase harmful outputs in adversarial settings. In this work, we ask whether the long CoTs can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-08 Yik Siu Chan , Zheng-Xin Yong , Stephen H. Bach

Language models (LMs) with less than 100B parameters are known to perform poorly on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in contrast to large LMs when solving unseen tasks. In this work, we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Seungone Kim , Se June Joo , Doyoung Kim , Joel Jang , Seonghyeon Ye , Jamin Shin , Minjoon Seo

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrably enhanced the performance of Large Language Models on tasks requiring multi-step inference. This success has led to widespread claims of emergent reasoning capabilities in these models. In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-10 Jintian Shao , Yiming Cheng

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) distillation from Large Language Models (LLMs) often induces "overthinking" in Small Language Models (SLMs), leading to performance degradation and excessive token consumption. In this study, we propose Disciplined…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-26 Shunsuke Ubukata

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yang , Ke Lin , Xing Yu

Large Language Models (LLMs) employ Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to deconstruct complex problems. While longer CoTs are often presumed superior, this paper challenges that notion, arguing that longer is not always better. Drawing on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yuyang Wu , Yifei Wang , Ziyu Ye , Tianqi Du , Stefanie Jegelka , Yisen Wang

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

Recent advances in vision language models (VLMs) offer reasoning capabilities, yet how these unfold and integrate visual and textual information remains unclear. We analyze reasoning dynamics in 18 VLMs covering instruction-tuned and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Danae Sánchez Villegas , Samuel Lewis-Lim , Nikolaos Aletras , Desmond Elliott

Modern large language models rely on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning to achieve impressive performance, yet the same mechanism can amplify deceptive alignment, situations in which a model appears aligned while covertly pursuing misaligned…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Jiaming Ji , Wenqi Chen , Kaile Wang , Donghai Hong , Sitong Fang , Boyuan Chen , Jiayi Zhou , Juntao Dai , Sirui Han , Yike Guo , Yaodong Yang

Recent work has demonstrated that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) often yields limited gains for soft-reasoning problems such as analytical and commonsense reasoning. CoT can also be unfaithful to a model's actual reasoning. We investigate the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

Monitoring chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is a foundational safety technique for large language model (LLM) agents; however, this oversight is compromised if models learn to conceal their reasoning. We explore the potential for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Artem Karpov

Chain-of-thought prompting (CoT) has the potential to improve the explainability of language model reasoning. But CoT can also systematically misrepresent the factors influencing models' behavior -- for example, rationalizing answers in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-30 James Chua , Edward Rees , Hunar Batra , Samuel R. Bowman , Julian Michael , Ethan Perez , Miles Turpin

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting boosts Large Language Models accuracy on multi-step tasks, yet whether the generated "thoughts" reflect the true internal reasoning process is unresolved. We present the first feature-level causal study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-01 Xi Chen , Aske Plaat , Niki van Stein