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While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive reasoning capabilities, growing evidence suggests much of their success stems from memorized answer-reasoning patterns rather than genuine inference. In this work, we investigate a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Yang Wu , Yifan Zhang , Yiwei Wang , Yujun Cai , Yurong Wu , Yuran Wang , Ning Xu , Jian Cheng

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enhances performance of large language models, but questions remain about whether these reasoning traces faithfully reflect the internal processes of the model. We present the first comprehensive study of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Sriram Balasubramanian , Samyadeep Basu , Soheil Feizi

Chain-of-thought explanations are widely used to inspect the decision process of large language models (LLMs) and to evaluate the trustworthiness of model outputs, making them important for effective collaboration between LLMs and humans.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Pedro Ferreira , Wilker Aziz , Ivan Titov

When prompted to think step-by-step, language models (LMs) produce a chain of thought (CoT), a sequence of reasoning steps that the model supposedly used to produce its prediction. Despite much work on CoT prompting, it is unclear if…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Martin Tutek , Fateme Hashemi Chaleshtori , Ana Marasović , Yonatan Belinkov

The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the…

While large language models (LLMs) are proficient at question-answering (QA), it is not always clear how (or even if) an answer follows from their latent "beliefs". This lack of interpretability is a growing impediment to widespread use of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Nora Kassner , Oyvind Tafjord , Ashish Sabharwal , Kyle Richardson , Hinrich Schuetze , Peter Clark

Should we trust Large Language Models (LLMs) with high accuracy? LLMs achieve high accuracy on reasoning benchmarks, but correctness alone does not reveal the quality of the reasoning used to produce it. This highlights a fundamental…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Manas Pathak , Xingyao Chen , Shuozhe Li , Amy Zhang , Liu Leqi

Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings where reliable uncertainty quantification (UQ) is as important as predictive accuracy. Extended reasoning via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-18 Robert Welch , Emir Konuk , Kevin Smith

Latent reasoning models (LRMs) have attracted significant research interest due to their low inference cost (relative to explicit reasoning models) and theoretical ability to explore multiple reasoning paths in parallel. However, these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Connor Dilgren , Sarah Wiegreffe

Large language models (LLMs) have shown an impressive ability to perform tasks believed to require thought processes. When the model does not document an explicit thought process, it becomes difficult to understand the processes occurring…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Yuval Shalev , Amir Feder , Ariel Goldstein

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

The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a central focus of study in NLP. In this paper, we consider the case of syllogistic reasoning, an area of deductive reasoning studied extensively in logic and cognitive…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Leonardo Bertolazzi , Albert Gatt , Raffaella Bernardi

Reasoning-capable large language models solve hard problems by emitting long chains of thought, paying heavily in latency, GPU time, and energy. Casual inspection of their traces reveals extensive reformulation, verification, and circular…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Zhiyuan Zhai , Xinkai You , Wenjing Yan , Xin Wang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) achieve strong performance on mathematical reasoning tasks, often attributed to their capability to generate explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) explanations. However, recent work shows that LRMs often arrive at…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yihong Liu , Raoyuan Zhao , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Language models trained to solve reasoning tasks via reinforcement learning have achieved striking results. We refer to these models as reasoning models. Are the Chains of Thought (CoTs) of reasoning models more faithful than traditional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 James Chua , Owain Evans

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown that test-time scaling can substantially improve model performance on complex tasks, particularly in the coding domain. Under this paradigm, models use a larger token budget during…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Jiaxin Fang , Runyuan He , Sahil Bhatia , Neel Gajare , Alvin Cheung

Large language models (LLMs) can produce chains of thought (CoT) that do not accurately reflect the actual factors driving their answers. In multiple-choice settings with an injected hint favoring a particular option, models may shift their…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Parsa Mirtaheri , Mikhail Belkin

Do reasoning models have "Aha!" moments? Prior work suggests that models like DeepSeek-R1-Zero undergo sudden mid-trace realizations that lead to accurate outputs, implying an intrinsic capacity for self-correction. Yet, it remains unclear…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Liv G. d'Aliberti , Manoel Horta Ribeiro

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

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicited via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) practices. However, whether fundamental reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Xingwei Tan , Marco Valentino , Mahmud Elahi Akhter , Yuxiang Zhou , Maria Liakata , Nikolaos Aletras