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Whether intermediate reasoning is computationally useful or merely explanatory depends on whether chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens contain task-relevant information. We present a mechanistic causal analysis of CoT on GSM8K using activation…

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are widely used in many sub-fields of natural language processing (NLP) and generally known as excellent few-shot learners with task-specific exemplars. Notably, chain of thought (CoT) prompting, a…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning with self-consistency improves performance by aggregating multiple sampled reasoning paths. In this setting, correctness is no longer tied to a single reasoning trace but to the aggregation rule over a pool…

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) holds a significant place in augmenting the reasoning performance for large language models (LLMs). While some studies focus on improving CoT accuracy through methods like retrieval enhancement, yet a rigorous…

Corruption studies, the standard tool for evaluating chain-of-thought (CoT) faithfulness, infer which steps are ``computationally important'' from accuracy loss when steps are corrupted. We show that when benchmark chains end with an…

Prompting a language model (LM) is an increasingly important research topic for better utilization of large language models (LLMs). While simple prompting is effective for single-step questions, it fails to activate the correct knowledge…

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 for language models demonstrates impressive performance across reasoning tasks, but typically needs labeled exemplars of the reasoning process. In this work, we introduce a new prompting approach, analogical…

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting boosts Large Language Models accuracy on multi-step tasks, yet whether the generated "thoughts" reflect the true internal reasoning process is unresolved. We present the first feature-level causal study of…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in tasks requiring reasoning and multi-step problem-solving through the use of chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, generating the full CoT process results in…

Language models can solve complex reasoning tasks better by learning to generate rationales for their predictions. Often these models know how to solve a task but their auto-regressive decoding nature leads to incorrect results if they…

Large language models (LLMs) have scaled up to unlock a wide range of complex reasoning tasks with the aid of various prompting methods. However, current prompting methods generate natural language intermediate steps to help reasoning,…

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…

When leveraging language models for reasoning tasks, generating explicit chain-of-thought (CoT) steps often proves essential for achieving high accuracy in final outputs. In this paper, we investigate if models can be taught to internalize…

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…

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising…

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…

Language models (LMs) with less than 100B parameters are known to perform poorly on chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning in contrast to large LMs when solving unseen tasks. In this work, we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step…

Recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance by incorporating functional symbolic representations that abstractly describe graph traversal algorithms and step-by-step reasoning 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)…