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Zero-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting emerges as a simple and effective strategy for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs) in real-world reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, the efficacy of a singular, task-level prompt…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Xiaosong Yuan , Chen Shen , Shaotian Yan , Xiaofeng Zhang , Liang Xie , Wenxiao Wang , Renchu Guan , Ying Wang , Jieping Ye

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Zayne Sprague , Fangcong Yin , Juan Diego Rodriguez , Dongwei Jiang , Manya Wadhwa , Prasann Singhal , Xinyu Zhao , Xi Ye , Kyle Mahowald , Greg Durrett

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kyle Cox , Darius Kianersi , Adrià Garriga-Alonso

This report examines the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in improving the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). Inspired by previous studies \cite{Min2022RethinkingWork}, we analyze the impact of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-29 Aayush Mishra , Karan Thakkar

Implicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) methods offer a token-efficient alternative to explicit CoT reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but a persistent performance gap has limited their adoption. We identify a core latent instability issue…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Xilin Wei , Xiaoran Liu , Yuhang Zang , Xiaoyi Dong , Yuhang Cao , Jiaqi Wang , Xipeng Qiu , Dahua Lin

Monitoring chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is a foundational safety technique for large language model (LLM) agents; however, this oversight is compromised if models learn to conceal their reasoning. We explore the potential for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Artem Karpov

Large Language Models, such as Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (aka. GPT-3), have been developed to understand language through the analysis of extensive text data, allowing them to identify patterns and connections between words.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-03 Baphumelele Masikisiki , Vukosi Marivate , Yvette Hlope

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Sunguk Choi , Yonghoon Kwon , Heondeuk Lee

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-03 Ziqian Bi , Kaijie Chen , Tianyang Wang , Junfeng Hao , Benji Peng , Xinyuan Song

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a common technique for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extended reasoning is often unnecessary and substantially increases token usage. As such, a key question…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Samuel Lewis-Lim , Xingwei Tan , Zhixue Zhao , Nikolaos Aletras

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, debates persist about whether LLMs exhibit abstract generalization or rely on shallow heuristics when…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-07 Akshara Prabhakar , Thomas L. Griffiths , R. Thomas McCoy

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced complex reasoning capabilities, particularly through extended chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning that incorporates mechanisms such as backtracking,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Baohao Liao , Xinyi Chen , Sara Rajaee , Yuhui Xu , Christian Herold , Anders Søgaard , Maarten de Rijke , Christof Monz

We present a single attention head in GPT-2 Small that has one main role across the entire training distribution. If components in earlier layers predict a certain token, and this token appears earlier in the context, the head suppresses…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Callum McDougall , Arthur Conmy , Cody Rushing , Thomas McGrath , Neel Nanda

Recent advances in large reasoning language models (LRLMs) rely on test-time scaling, which extends long chain-of-thought (CoT) generation to solve complex tasks. However, overthinking in long CoT not only slows down the efficiency of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Chenxu Yang , Qingyi Si , Yongjie Duan , Zheliang Zhu , Chenyu Zhu , Qiaowei Li , Minghui Chen , Zheng Lin , Weiping Wang

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve impressive accuracy on mathematical reasoning benchmarks, yet their performance drops when problems are modified with simple changes like different names or numbers. Code execution methods, which let…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Matthew Kutakh

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

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

Large language models (LLMs) equipped with chain-of-thought (CoT) achieve strong performance and offer a window into LLM behavior. However, recent evidence suggests that improvements in CoT capabilities often come with redundant reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yanrui Du , Sendong Zhao , Yibo Gao , Danyang Zhao , Qika Lin , Ming Ma , Jiayun Li , Yi Jiang , Kai He , Qianyi Xu , Bing Qin , Mengling Feng

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has brought substantial attention to the Chain of Thought (CoT) approach, primarily due to its ability to enhance the capability of LLMs on complex reasoning tasks. Moreover, the significance…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Bingshuai Liu , Chenyang Lyu , Zijun Min , Zhanyu Wang , Jinsong Su , Longyue Wang

Reasoning large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior capacities in solving complicated problems by generating long chain-of-thoughts (CoT), but such a lengthy CoT incurs high inference costs. Previous methods on inference-stage…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Minjia Mao , Bowen Yin , Yu Zhu , Xiao Fang