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Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP). However, its vast potential remains largely unexplored for graphs. This raises an interesting question: How can we design CoT prompting…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Xingtong Yu , Chang Zhou , Zhongwei Kuai , Xinming Zhang , Yuan Fang

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

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning is fundamental to modern LLM architectures and represents a critical intervention point for AI safety. However, CoT reasoning may exhibit failure modes that we note as pathologies, which prevent it from…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-02-17 Manqing Liu , David Williams-King , Ida Caspary , Linh Le , Hannes Whittingham , Puria Radmard , Cameron Tice , Edward James Young

In information retrieval, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential in text reranking tasks by leveraging their sophisticated natural language understanding and advanced reasoning capabilities. However,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Haowei Liu , Xuyang Wu , Guohao Sun , Zhiqiang Tao , Yi Fang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) enhances an LLM's ability to perform complex reasoning tasks, but it also introduces new security issues. In this work, we present ShadowCoT, a novel backdoor attack framework that targets the internal reasoning…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-23 Gejian Zhao , Hanzhou Wu , Xinpeng Zhang , Athanasios V. Vasilakos

Chain of thought is a natural inference-time method for increasing the computational power of transformer-based large language models (LLMs), but comes at the cost of sequential decoding. Are there more efficient alternatives to expand a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-07 William Merrill , Ashish Sabharwal

Chain of thought (CoT) fine-tuning aims to endow large language models (LLMs) with reasoning capabilities by training them on curated reasoning traces. It leverages both supervised and reinforced fine-tuning to cultivate human-like…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Xiaoshu Chen , Sihang Zhou , Ke Liang , Duanyang Yuan , Haoyuan Chen , Xiaoyu Sun , Lingyuan Meng , Xinwang Liu

Reasoning with a chain-of-thought (CoT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks but incurs significant inference costs due to the generation of long rationales. We propose Thinking States, a method that performs…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Ido Amos , Avi Caciularu , Mor Geva , Amir Globerson , Jonathan Herzig , Lior Shani , Idan Szpektor

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

While Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models, the faithfulness of the generated rationales remains an open problem for model interpretability. We propose a novel theoretical lens for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Elija Perrier

Due to the proliferation of short-form content and the rapid adoption of AI, opportunities for deep, reflective thinking have significantly diminished, undermining users' critical thinking and reducing engagement with the reasoning behind…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-04-28 Seunghyun Yoo

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has improved the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), but it remains unclear why it works and whether it is the unique mechanism for triggering reasoning in large language models. In this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Zhenghao He , Guangzhi Xiong , Bohan Liu , Sanchit Sinha , Aidong Zhang

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has widely enhanced mathematical reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), but it still remains challenging for extending it to multimodal domains. Existing works either adopt a similar textual reasoning for image…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Xinyan Chen , Renrui Zhang , Dongzhi Jiang , Aojun Zhou , Shilin Yan , Weifeng Lin , Hongsheng Li

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. However, conventional CoT relies on explicitly verbalized intermediate steps, which constrains its broader…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Xinghao Chen , Anhao Zhao , Heming Xia , Xuan Lu , Hanlin Wang , Yanjun Chen , Wei Zhang , Jian Wang , Wenjie Li , Xiaoyu Shen

Multi-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has significantly advanced the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs by leveraging explicit reasoning steps. However, the widespread adoption of Long CoT often results in sequence lengths that exceed…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Jia-Chen Zhang , Yu-Jie Xiong , Zheng Zhou

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

It has been shown that the chain of thought (CoT) can enhance the power of large language models (LLMs) to solve certain mathematical reasoning problems. However, the capacity of CoT is still not fully explored. As an important instance,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Lijia Yu , Xiao-Shan Gao , Lijun Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance as general-purpose assistants, excelling across a variety of reasoning tasks. This achievement represents a significant step toward achieving artificial general intelligence…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-13 Xiaoyu Tan , Yongxin Deng , Xihe Qiu , Weidi Xu , Chao Qu , Wei Chu , Yinghui Xu , Yuan Qi

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning enables large language models (LLMs) to break down complex problems into interpretable intermediate steps, significantly enhancing model transparency and performance in reasoning tasks. However, conventional…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Junda Wu , Yuxin Xiong , Xintong Li , Sheldon Yu , Zhengmian Hu , Tong Yu , Rui Wang , Xiang Chen , Jingbo Shang , Julian McAuley

Existing expressivity results for transformers typically rely on hardmax attention, high precision, and other architectural modifications that disconnect them from the models used in practice. We bridge this gap by analyzing standard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Moritz Brösamle , Stephan Eckstein