arXiv AI
Aug 5
Soft Guidance Starts to Outperform CoT Prompting as LLMs Improve
arXiv:2608. 03550v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting remains the standard baseline for evaluating models' reasoning abilities.
COMPASS: Finding Where Reasoning Lives in Language Models
The paper introduces COMPASS, an inference-time steering technique that enhances large language model performance on mathematical reasoning tasks. By using the correctness of a model’s direct answer attempts as a latent signal, COMPASS identifies a small subset of attention heads whose activations can be steered to elicit reasoning. Experiments across three model families and multiple math benchmarks show that COMPASS improves GSM8K accuracy by an average of 16 percentage points and achieves near Chain‑of‑Thought performance while generating 20–70% fewer tokens.
Related stories
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25
Mechanistic Interpretability of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Sequential Activation Patching
The paper introduces a sequential activation patching framework to study how Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting influences large language models over multiple generated tokens. By tracking CoT-conditioned attention-head activations across token positions and aggregating them with Part-of-Speech guidance, the authors identify distributed head sets that jointly contribute to answer generation. Targeted zero-ablation experiments confirm that these heads are functionally important, affecting mechanisms such as reasoning-trajectory maintenance, answer anchoring, exemplar-target separation, and numerical generation.
arXiv AI
Jul 24
Post-Hoc Reasoning in Chain of Thought: Decoding and Steering Pre-Committed Answers
arXiv:2603. 01437v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: 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 verbalized reasoning.
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11
Rethinking Reasoning with MDLMs: Early Exits, Post-hoc Reasoning, and Beyond
arXiv:2510. 19990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reasoning paradigm, where language models reason before answering, has enabled breakthroughs on tasks such as mathematical problem-solving.
arXiv AI
Sep 15
Post-Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost
arXiv:2605.06165v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: As the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) accelerates, token consumption from intermediate reasoning traces increasingly contribut...
arXiv AI
Jul 14
Valid $\ne$ Necessary: Diagnosing Latent Inefficiency in Chain-of-Thought
arXiv:2607. 11266v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has significantly advanced the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it often incurs substantial computational costs due to over-reasoning: the generation of redundant, verbose, or irrelevant steps.
arXiv AI
Jun 15
Fractured Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9
ATLAS: Verifier-Guided Adaptive Latent Activation Steering for Efficient LLM Reasoning
arXiv:2601. 03093v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent work on activation and latent steering has demonstrated that modifying internal representations can effectively guide large language models (LLMs) toward improved reasoning and efficiency without updating model parameters.
arXiv AI
Sep 28
Can Linguistic Reasoning Vectors Enhance Multimodal Reasoning Ability?
The paper introduces LIFT, a lightweight vector‑intervention technique that transfers reasoning capability from a base large language model (LLM) to a vision‑language model (VLM) without retraining the VLM backbone. LIFT defines Reasoning Vectors as differences in hidden states between a reasoning path with an explicit trace and a solver path without it, and injects these vectors into the VLM’s language‑side activations. Experiments on two VLMs across six reasoning benchmarks show that vectors derived from the base LLM consistently outperform those derived from the aligned VLM, indicating that the base LLM is a more effective source for recovering degraded reasoning. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that a simple, frozen‑backbone intervention can partially restore reasoning abilities in multimodal models, highlighting the value of leveraging the original language model’s reasoning power."
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9
Attention Illuminates LLM Reasoning: The Preplan-and-Anchor Rhythm Enables Fine-Grained Policy Optimization
arXiv:2510. 13554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps.
arXiv AI
Sep 16
State of Thought Enables Endogenous Reasoning
arXiv:2609.16055v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time compute has emerged as a major approach to improving the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing test-time reasonin...
arXiv AI
Jun 15
Implicit Reasoning for Large Language Model-based Generative Recommendation
arXiv:2606. 14142v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly adopted as backbones for Generative Recommendation (GR), promising access to pretrained world knowledge.