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While large language models (LLMs) excel in mathematical and code reasoning, we observe they struggle with social reasoning tasks, exhibiting cognitive confusion, logical inconsistencies, and conflation between objective world states and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jialu Du , Guiyang Hou , Yihui Fu , Chen Wu , Wenqi Zhang , Yongliang Shen , Weiming Lu

Transferring reasoning capabilities from larger language models to smaller ones through supervised fine-tuning often fails counterintuitively, with performance degrading despite access to high-quality teacher demonstrations. We identify…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Jaehoon Kim , Kwangwook Seo , Dongha Lee

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

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced complex reasoning capabilities, particularly through extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that incorporates mechanisms such as backtracking,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Baohao Liao , Xinyi Chen , Sara Rajaee , Yuhui Xu , Christian Herold , Anders Søgaard , Maarten de Rijke , Christof Monz

Thinking LLMs produce reasoning traces before answering. Prior activation steering work mainly targets on shaping these traces. It remains less understood how answer tokens actually read and integrate the reasoning to produce reliable…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-22 Haoyang Chen , Yi Liu , Jianzhi Shao , Tao Zhang , Chengfu Huo , Wei Hu

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) is intended to improve their reasoning capabilities, yet we uncover a counterintuitive effect: models often forget how to solve problems they previously answered correctly during training. We term…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Yuetai Li , Zhangchen Xu , Fengqing Jiang , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Luyao Niu , Bill Yuchen Lin , Xiang Yue , Radha Poovendran

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing and hold growing promise for advancing science, healthcare, and decision-making. Yet their training paradigms remain dominated by affirmation-based inference, akin to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Peter B. Walker , Hannah Davidson , Aiden Foster , Matthew Lienert , Thomas Pardue , Dale Russell

The emergent few-shot reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have excited the natural language and machine learning community over recent years. Despite of numerous successful applications, the underlying mechanism of such…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-09 Xiaojuan Tang , Zilong Zheng , Jiaqi Li , Fanxu Meng , Song-Chun Zhu , Yitao Liang , Muhan Zhang

Modern language models (LMs) exhibit strong deductive reasoning capabilities, yet standard evaluations emphasize correctness while overlooking a key aspect of reasoning: efficiency. In real-world reasoning scenarios, much of the available…

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit limited logical coherence, mapping premises to conclusions without adherence to explicit inference rules. We propose Proof-Carrying Reasoning with LLMs (PCRLLM), a framework that constrains…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-12 Tangrui Li , Pei Wang , Hongzheng Wang Christian Hahm , Matteo Spatola , Justin Shi

Reasoning LLMs are trained to verbalize their reasoning process, yielding strong gains on complex tasks. This transparency also opens a promising direction: multiple reasoners can directly collaborate on each other's thinking within a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Aochong Oliver Li , Tanya Goyal

Reflection, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate and revise their own reasoning, has been widely used to improve performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, most prior works emphasizes designing reflective prompting…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-12 Fu-Chieh Chang , Yu-Ting Lee , Pei-Yuan Wu

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, but still struggle with complex reasoning tasks requiring multiple steps. While prompt-based methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can improve LLM reasoning at inference time,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Haolin Chen , Yihao Feng , Zuxin Liu , Weiran Yao , Akshara Prabhakar , Shelby Heinecke , Ricky Ho , Phil Mui , Silvio Savarese , Caiming Xiong , Huan Wang

Step-by-step reasoning is widely used to enhance the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in complex problems. Evaluating the quality of reasoning traces is crucial for understanding and improving LLM reasoning. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Jinu Lee , Julia Hockenmaier

Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the stored knowledge in these models may inevitably be incomplete, out-of-date, or incorrect. This motivates the need to utilize…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-01-03 Hangfeng He , Hongming Zhang , Dan Roth

Recent advances in model distillation show that data from advanced reasoning models can effectively train smaller student models. However, standard practices discard incorrect reasoning traces -- valuable, yet underutilized data. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Shuyao Xu , Cheng Peng , Jiangxuan Long , Weidi Xu , Wei Chu , Yuan Qi

Large Language Models (LLMs) often falter in complex reasoning tasks due to their static, parametric knowledge, leading to hallucinations and poor performance in specialized domains like mathematics. This work explores a fundamental…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Srijan Shakya , Anamaria-Roberta Hartl , Sepp Hochreiter , Korbinian Pöppel

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as partners in knowledge work, where the shared conversational record functions as the decision record that safeguards work continuity. We characterize a class of context failures we…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-28 William J. Bensen

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at reasoning and planning when trained on chainof-thought (CoT) data, where the step-by-step thought process is explicitly outlined by text tokens. However, this results in lengthy inputs where many words…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 DiJia Su , Hanlin Zhu , Yingchen Xu , Jiantao Jiao , Yuandong Tian , Qinqing Zheng

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved strong performance on complex reasoning tasks using techniques such as chain-of-thought and self-consistency. However, ensemble-based approaches, especially self-consistency which relies on…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Qinglin Zeng , Jing Yang , Keze Wang