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Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used method to improve the reasoning capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). More recently, CoT has been leveraged in Knowledge Distillation (KD) to transfer reasoning capability from a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-10 Cong-Thanh Do , Rama Doddipatla , Kate Knill

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

Recent advancements in large language models have showcased their remarkable generalizability across various domains. However, their reasoning abilities still have significant room for improvement, especially when confronted with scenarios…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-27 Xufeng Zhao , Mengdi Li , Wenhao Lu , Cornelius Weber , Jae Hee Lee , Kun Chu , Stefan Wermter

Chain of Thought (CoT) was introduced in recent research as a method for improving step-by-step reasoning in Large Language Models. However, CoT has limited applications such as its need for hand-crafted few-shot exemplar prompts and no…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-11 Arda Sevinc , Abdurrahman Gumus

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…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Naizhu Jin , Zhong Li , Guang Yang , Tian Zhang , Qingkai Zeng

Mathematical reasoning is regarded as a necessary ability for Language Models (LMs). Recent works demonstrate large LMs' impressive performance in solving math problems. The success is attributed to their Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-08 Tianduo Wang , Wei Lu

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances the reasoning of large language models (LLMs) by decomposing problems into sequential steps, mimicking human logic and reducing errors. However, complex tasks with vast solution spaces and vague…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Chenghao Li , Chaoning Zhang , Yi Lu , Jiaquan Zhang , Qigan Sun , Xudong Wang , Jiwei Wei , Guoqing Wang , Yang Yang , Heng Tao Shen

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-24 Yunzhen Feng , Julia Kempe , Cheng Zhang , Parag Jain , Anthony Hartshorn

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting substantially improves the sample efficiency of transformers, reducing the complexity of tasks like parity learning from exponential to polynomial in the input length. However, generating explicit reasoning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Yixiao Huang , Hanlin Zhu , Zixuan Wang , Jiantao Jiao , Stuart Russell , Somayeh Sojoudi , Song Mei

There exist both scalable tasks, like reading comprehension and fact-checking, where model performance improves with model size, and unscalable tasks, like arithmetic reasoning and symbolic reasoning, where model performance does not…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Masahiro Kaneko , Danushka Bollegala , Naoaki Okazaki , Timothy Baldwin

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) significantly enhances formal reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs) by training them to explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps. While LLMs readily benefit from such techniques, improving…

Curriculum learning for training LLMs requires a difficulty signal that aligns with reasoning while remaining scalable and interpretable. We propose a simple premise: tasks that demand deeper depth of thought for humans should also be…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-27 Jeesu Jung , Sangkeun Jung

Large reasoning models (LRMs) increasingly rely on step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to improve task performance, particularly in high-resource languages such as English. While recent work has examined final-answer accuracy in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 Raoyuan Zhao , Yihong Liu , Hinrich Schütze , Michael A. Hedderich

Stance detection aims to identify the attitude expressed in a document towards a given target. Techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting have advanced this task, enhancing a model's reasoning capabilities through the derivation of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-08 Kairui Hu , Ming Yan , Joey Tianyi Zhou , Ivor W. Tsang , Wen Haw Chong , Yong Keong Yap

Large language models (LLMs) have shown limitations in tasks requiring complex logical reasoning and multi-step problem-solving. To address these challenges, researchers have employed carefully designed prompts and flowcharts, simulating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-06 Changcheng Li , Xiangyu Wang , Qiuju Chen , Xiren Zhou , Huanhuan Chen

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) supervision has become a common strategy to enhance reasoning in language models. While effective for large models, we identify a phenomenon we call Long CoT Degradation, in which small language models (SLMs;…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Renjie Luo , Jiaxi Li , Chen Huang , Wei Lu

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning provides a significant performance uplift to LLMs by enabling planning, exploration, and deliberation of their actions. CoT is also a powerful tool for monitoring the behaviours of these agents: when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-21 Nathaniel Mitrani Hadida , Sassan Bhanji , Cameron Tice , Puria Radmard

The honesty of large language models (LLMs) is a critical alignment challenge, especially as advanced systems with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning may strategically deceive humans. Unlike traditional honesty issues on LLMs, which could be…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Kai Wang , Yihao Zhang , Meng Sun

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can effectively elicit complex multi-step reasoning from Large Language Models~(LLMs). For example, by simply adding CoT instruction ``Let's think step-by-step'' to each input query of MultiArith dataset,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-04-19 Jiuhai Chen , Lichang Chen , Heng Huang , Tianyi Zhou

Chain-of-Thought (CoT), a step-wise and coherent reasoning chain, shows its impressive strength when used as a prompting strategy for large language models (LLM). Recent years, the prominent effect of CoT prompting has attracted emerging…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Zihan Yu , Liang He , Zhen Wu , Xinyu Dai , Jiajun Chen