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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)…

While long, explicit chains-of-thought (CoT) have proven effective on complex reasoning tasks, they are costly to generate during inference. Non-verbal reasoning methods have emerged with shorter generation lengths by leveraging continuous…

With the rapid advancement of large reasoning models, long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrated strong performance on complex tasks. However, this often comes with a significant increase in token usage. In this paper, we…

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…

Large Language Models (LLMs) solve many reasoning tasks via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, but smaller models (about 7 to 8B parameters) still struggle with multi-step reasoning under tight compute and token budgets. Existing test time…

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…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Recent large language models achieve strong reasoning performance by generating detailed chain-of-thought traces, but this often leads to excessive token use and high inference latency. Existing efficiency approaches typically focus on…

Objective: To improve the efficiency of medical question answering (MedQA) with large language models (LLMs) by avoiding unnecessary reasoning while maintaining accuracy. Methods: We propose Selective Chain-of-Thought (Selective CoT), an…

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…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) spend substantial test-time compute on long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, but what *characterizes* an effective CoT remains unclear. While prior work reports gains from lengthening CoTs and increasing review…

Large language models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on code generation, but the mechanisms by which Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting helps remain unclear. We present a systematic empirical and information-theoretic study of CoT…

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…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs) but often leads to verbose and redundant outputs, thus increasing inference cost. We hypothesize that many reasoning steps are unnecessary for producing…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting reliably improves language-model accuracy, but which properties of a rationale text drive the improvement is poorly understood. Prior work has largely studied generation-time behavior. We instead ask a…

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…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances the problem-solving ability of large language models (LLMs) but leads to substantial inference overhead, limiting deployment in resource-constrained settings. This paper investigates efficient CoT…

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…

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…

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting helps Large Language Models (LLMs) solve difficult problems, but very long traces often slow or even degrade performance on fast, intuitive "System-1" tasks. We introduce Connector-Aware Compact CoT…