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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 a method that enables language models to handle complex reasoning tasks by decomposing them into simpler steps. Despite its success, the underlying mechanics of CoT are not yet fully understood. In an attempt to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-09 Yingcong Li , Kartik Sreenivasan , Angeliki Giannou , Dimitris Papailiopoulos , Samet Oymak

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

Latent or continuous chain-of-thought methods replace explicit textual rationales with a number of internal latent steps, but these intermediate computations are difficult to evaluate beyond correlation-based probes. In this paper, we view…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Zirui Li , Xuefeng Bai , Kehai Chen , Yizhi Li , Jian Yang , Chenghua Lin , Min Zhang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning generated by large language models (LLMs) is often unfaithful: intermediate steps can be logically inconsistent or fail to reflect the causal relationship leading to the final answer. Despite extensive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Fuxin Wang , Amr Alazali , Yiqiao Zhong

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 exhibit sycophancy: prioritizing agreeableness over correctness. Current remedies evaluate reasoning outcomes: RLHF rewards correct answers, self-correction critiques outputs. All require ground truth, which is often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Edward Y. Chang

The performance of modern language models (LMs) has been improved by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, i.e., the process of generating intermediate results that guide the model towards a final answer. A possible explanation for this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Franz Nowak , Anej Svete , Alexandra Butoi , Ryan Cotterell

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 is widely used as a reasoning aid and is often treated as a transparency mechanism. Yet behavioral gains under CoT do not imply that the model's internal computation causally depends on the emitted reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Anish Sathyanarayanan , Aditya Nagarsekar , Aarush Rathore

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly show reasoning rationales alongside their answers, turning "reasoning" into a user-interface element. While step-by-step rationales are typically associated with model performance, how they…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Xin Sun , Shu Wei , Jos A Bosch , Isao Echizen , Saku Sugawara , Abdallah El Ali

Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts. While prior work has…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Magda Dubois , Cozmin Ududec , Christopher Summerfield , Lennart Luettgau

Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) has become a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs); however, the performance gains often come with a substantial increase in reasoning budget. Recent studies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jie Cao , Tianwei Lin , Zhenxuan Fan , Bo Yuan , Ziyuan Zhao , Rolan Yan , Wenqiao Zhang , Siliang Tang

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a simple and effective method for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). The basic idea of CoT is to let LLMs break down their thought processes step-by-step by putting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-16 Yoonjeong Park , Hyunjin Kim , Chanyeol Choi , Junseong Kim , Jy-yong Sohn

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces have been shown to improve performance of large language models on a plethora of reasoning tasks, yet there is no consensus on the mechanism by which this boost is achieved. To shed more light on this, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Soumadeep Saha , Akshay Chaturvedi , Saptarshi Saha , Utpal Garain , Nicholas Asher

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

Language Models (LMs) emit Chains-of-Thought (CoTs) that drive much of their capability. However, the same sequence that carries useful reasoning can also covertly convey messages: a misaligned model may embed covert information in its CoT…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Zhejian Zhou , Jonathan May

Language models trained via outcome-based reinforcement learning (RL) to reason using chain-of-thought (CoT) have shown remarkable performance. Monitoring such a model's CoT may allow us to understand its intentions and detect potential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Arun Jose

This report examines the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in improving the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by previous studies \cite{Min2022RethinkingWork}, we analyze the impact of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Aayush Mishra , Karan Thakkar

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces are increasingly used both to improve language model capability and to audit model behavior, implicitly assuming that the visible trace remains synchronized with the computation that determines the answer. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Wenkai Li , Fan Yang , Ananya Hazarika , Shaunak A. Mehta , Koichi Onoue