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Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has enabled large language models (LLMs) to utilize additional computation through intermediate tokens to solve complex tasks. However, we posit that typical reasoning traces contain many redundant tokens,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Tergel Munkhbat , Namgyu Ho , Seo Hyun Kim , Yongjin Yang , Yujin Kim , Se-Young Yun

Recently, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly enhanced the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but Vision-Language Models (VLMs) still struggle with multi-step reasoning tasks due to limited multimodal reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Yuliang Zhan , Xinyu Tang , Han Wan , Jian Li , Ji-Rong Wen , Hao Sun

Many recent language models (LMs) of Transformers family exhibit so-called in-context learning (ICL) ability, manifested in the LMs' ability to modulate their function by a task described in a natural language input. Previous work curating…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-05-24 Michal Štefánik , Marek Kadlčík

Despite superior reasoning prowess demonstrated by Large Language Models (LLMs) with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, a lack of understanding prevails around the internal mechanisms of the models that facilitate CoT generation. This work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Subhabrata Dutta , Joykirat Singh , Soumen Chakrabarti , Tanmoy Chakraborty

We propose a synthetic reasoning task, LEGO (Learning Equality and Group Operations), that encapsulates the problem of following a chain of reasoning, and we study how the Transformer architectures learn this task. We pay special attention…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-02-21 Yi Zhang , Arturs Backurs , Sébastien Bubeck , Ronen Eldan , Suriya Gunasekar , Tal Wagner

Using Large Language Models to produce intermediate thoughts, a.k.a. Chain-of-thought (CoT), before providing an answer has been a successful recipe for solving complex language tasks. In robotics, similar embodied CoT strategies,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Pietro Mazzaglia , Cansu Sancaktar , Markus Peschl , Daniel Dijkman

Generating intermediate steps, or Chain of Thought (CoT), is an effective way to significantly improve language models' (LM) multi-step reasoning capability. However, the CoT lengths can grow rapidly with the problem complexity, easily…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Soochan Lee , Gunhee Kim

Scaling inference compute enhances reasoning in large language models (LLMs), with long chains-of-thought (CoTs) enabling strategies like backtracking and error correction. Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a crucial method for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-06 Edward Yeo , Yuxuan Tong , Morry Niu , Graham Neubig , Xiang Yue

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) serves as a critical emerging ability in LLMs, especially when it comes to logical reasoning. Attempts have been made to induce such ability in small models as well by distilling from the data with CoT generated by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-05 Nuwa Xi , Yuhan Chen , Sendong Zhao , Haochun Wang , Bing Qin , Ting Liu

Chain of Thought (CoT) has been applied to various large language models (LLMs) and proven to be effective in improving the quality of outputs. In recent studies, transformers are proven to have absolute upper bounds in terms of expressive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-17 Lang Yin , Debangshu Banerjee , Gagandeep Singh

Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning enhances language models' performance but often leads to inefficient "overthinking" on simple problems. We identify that existing approaches directly penalizing reasoning length fail to account for varying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Junjie Yang , Ke Lin , Xing Yu

The reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have improved substantially through increased test-time computation, typically in the form of intermediate tokens known as chain-of-thought (CoT). However, CoT often becomes…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Nathanaël Carraz Rakotonirina , Ren Pang , Neha Anna John , Michael Bohlke-Schneider , Momchil Hardalov

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a popular in-context learning (ICL) approach for large language models (LLMs), especially when tackling complex reasoning tasks. Traditional ICL approaches construct prompts using examples that contain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Zifan Xu , Haozhu Wang , Dmitriy Bespalov , Xian Wu , Peter Stone , Yanjun Qi

Generalization to novel compound tasks under distribution shift is important for deploying transformer-based language models (LMs). This work investigates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning as a means to enhance OOD generalization. Through…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Ru Wang , Wei Huang , Selena Song , Haoyu Zhang , Qian Niu , Yusuke Iwasawa , Yutaka Matsuo , Jiaxian Guo

Transformers have shown potential in solving wireless communication problems, particularly via in-context learning (ICL), where models adapt to new tasks through prompts without requiring model updates. However, prior ICL-based Transformer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Li Fan , Peng Wang , Jing Yang , Cong Shen

Scaling language models to larger and deeper sizes has led to significant boosts in performance. Even though the size of these models limits their application in compute-constrained environments, the race to continually develop ever larger…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-16 Amirkeivan Mohtashami , Matteo Pagliardini , Martin Jaggi

Recent advances in chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting have enabled large language models (LLMs) to perform multi-step reasoning. However, the explainability of such reasoning remains limited, with prior work primarily focusing on local…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Sheldon Yu , Yuxin Xiong , Junda Wu , Xintong Li , Tong Yu , Xiang Chen , Ritwik Sinha , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning successfully enhances the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it incurs substantial computational overhead for inference. Existing CoT compression methods often suffer from a critical…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Yuntian Tang , Bohan Jia , Wenxuan Huang , Lianyue Zhang , Jiao Xie , Wenxi Li , Wei Li , Jie Hu , Xinghao Chen Rongrong Ji , Shaohui Lin

Deep iterative chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables LLMs to tackle complex tasks by progressively activating relevant pre-trained knowledge. However, it faces challenges in ensuring continual improvement and determining a stopping…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Zongqian Wu , Tianyu Li , Baoduo Xu , Jiaying Yang , Mengmeng Zhan , Xiaofeng Zhu , Lei Feng

In-context learning (ICL) is a cornerstone of large language model (LLM) functionality, yet its theoretical foundations remain elusive due to the complexity of transformer architectures. In particular, most existing work only theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-18 Siyu Chen , Heejune Sheen , Tianhao Wang , Zhuoran Yang