Related papers: When Reasoning Traces Become Performative: Step-Le…

Recent advances in reasoning-focused Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced Chain-of-Thought (CoT) traces - intermediate reasoning steps generated before a final answer. These traces, as in DeepSeek R1, guide inference and train…

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…

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…

As chain-of-thought (CoT) has become central to scaling reasoning capabilities in large language models (LLMs), it has also emerged as a promising tool for interpretability, suggesting the opportunity to understand model decisions through…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has been proposed as a transparency mechanism for large language models in safety-critical deployments, yet its effectiveness depends on faithfulness (whether models accurately verbalize the factors that…

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…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a de-facto standard technique to elicit reasoning-like responses from large language models (LLMs), allowing them to spell out individual steps before giving a final answer. While the resemblance to…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting assumes that generated reasoning reflects a model's internal computation. We show this assumption is wrong in a specific, measurable way: models internally detect their own reasoning errors but outwardly…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) traces promise transparency for reasoning language models, but prior work shows they are not always faithful reflections of internal computation. This raises challenges for oversight: practitioners may misinterpret…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) offers a potential boon for AI safety as it allows monitoring a model's CoT to try to understand its intentions and reasoning processes. However, the effectiveness of such monitoring hinges on CoTs faithfully…

Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can encourage language models to engage in multi-step logical reasoning. The quality of the provided demonstrations significantly influences the success of downstream inference tasks. Current unsupervised…

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.…

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…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has demonstrably enhanced the performance of Large Language Models on tasks requiring multi-step inference. This success has led to widespread claims of emergent reasoning capabilities in these models. In…

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)…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has become central to mathematical reasoning in large language models, yet models remain brittle to early errors: a single arithmetic slip or unjustified inference typically propagates uncorrected to an…

Getting language models to reason correctly about code requires training on data where each reasoning step can be checked. Current synthetic Chain-of-Thought (CoT) training data often consists of plausible-sounding explanations generated by…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has been widely adopted to enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, the effectiveness of CoT reasoning is inconsistent across tasks with different reasoning types. This…

Detecting harmful AI actions is important as AI agents gain adoption. Chain-of-thought (CoT) monitoring is one method widely used to detect adversarial attacks and AI misalignment. However, attackers and misaligned models might evade CoT…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly enhanced the mathematical reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models. We find existing fine-tuning datasets frequently suffer from the "answer right but reasoning wrong" probelm, where…