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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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is a widely used inference-time technique for improving reasoning, yet its gains are uneven across tasks. We analyze when and why CoT helps by modeling the step-wise reasoning trajectory as a Markov chain.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zihan Wang , Yijun Dong , Qi Lei

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) is an efficient prompting method that enables the reasoning ability of large language models by augmenting the query using multiple examples with multiple intermediate steps. Despite the empirical success, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Hongkang Li , Songtao Lu , Pin-Yu Chen , Xiaodong Cui , Meng Wang

With the widespread use of language models (LMs) in NLP tasks, researchers have discovered the potential of Chain-of-thought (CoT) to assist LMs in accomplishing complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate steps. However, human…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Yao Yao , Zuchao Li , Hai Zhao

Recently, small models with latent recursion have obtained promising results on complex reasoning tasks. These results are typically explained by the theory that such recursion increases a networks depth, allowing it to compactly emulate…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Arip Asadulaev , Rayan Banerjee , Fakhri Karray , Martin Takac

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become a central mechanism for eliciting multi-step reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet recent evidence presents a tension: hidden states appear to already encode future reasoning before CoT…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Liyan Xu , Mo Yu , Fandong Meng , Jie Zhou

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

Chain-of-Thought reasoning has emerged as a pivotal methodology for enhancing model inference capabilities. Despite growing interest in Chain-of-Thought reasoning, its underlying mechanisms remain unclear. This paper explores the working…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Hao Yang , Zhiyu Yang , Yunjie Zhang , Shanyi Zhu , Lin Yang

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

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique has proven effective in improving the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, the performance gains are inconsistent across different tasks, and the underlying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Peijie Liu , Fengli Xu , Yong Li

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

While Long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning significantly improves Large Language Models (LLMs) performance on complex reasoning tasks, the substantial computational and memory costs of generating long CoT sequences limit their efficiency…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Liang Zhang , Yu Zhao , Longyue Wang , Tianqi Shi , Weihua Luo , Kaifu Zhang , Jinsong Su

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve promising performance but compromise token efficiency due to verbose reasoning processes. Unconscious Thought Theory (UTT) posits that complex problems can be solved more efficiently through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Ruihan Gong , Yue Liu , Wenjie Qu , Mingzhe Du , Yufei He , Yingwei Ma , Yulin Chen , Xiang Liu , Yi Wen , Xinfeng Li , Ruidong Wang , Xinzhong Zhu , Bryan Hooi , Jiaheng Zhang

Latent reasoning via continuous chain-of-thoughts (Latent CoT) has emerged as a promising alternative to discrete CoT reasoning. Operating in continuous space increases expressivity and has been hypothesized to enable superposition: the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Michael Rizvi-Martel , Guillaume Rabusseau , Marius Mosbach

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has become a foundation for eliciting multi-step reasoning in large language models, but recent studies show that its benefits do not scale monotonically with chain length: while longer CoT generally enables…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Bin Lei , Caiwen Ding , Jiachen Yang , Ang Li , Xin Eric Wang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting significantly enhances model reasoning, yet its internal mechanisms remain poorly understood. We analyze CoT's operational principles by reversely tracing information flow across decoding, projection, and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Hao Yang , Qinghua Zhao , Lei Li , Lingyi Meng , Mengda Yu

Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have highlighted the challenge of handling long-context tasks, where models need to reason over extensive input contexts to aggregate target information. While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Dawei Zhu , Xiyu Wei , Guangxiang Zhao , Wenhao Wu , Haosheng Zou , Junfeng Ran , Xun Wang , Lin Sun , Xiangzheng Zhang , Sujian Li

We study a novel language model architecture that is capable of scaling test-time computation by implicitly reasoning in latent space. Our model works by iterating a recurrent block, thereby unrolling to arbitrary depth at test-time. This…

Chain-of-thought reasoning, while powerful, can produce unnecessarily verbose output for simpler problems. We present a framework for difficulty-aware reasoning that teaches models to dynamically adjust reasoning depth based on problem…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-08 Abdul Waheed , Chancharik Mitra , Laurie Z. Wang , Deva Ramanan , Bhiksha Raj

Chain of Thought (CoT) is significant in improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the correlation between the effectiveness of CoT and the length of reasoning steps in prompts remains largely unknown. To…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Mingyu Jin , Qinkai Yu , Dong Shu , Haiyan Zhao , Wenyue Hua , Yanda Meng , Yongfeng Zhang , Mengnan Du