arXiv:2603.21676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, limiting their ability to generalize to tasks that require variable-depth reasoning....
By Hung-Hsuan Chen
arXiv:2607. 00341v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models achieve strong performance on many reasoning tasks when allowed to externalize intermediate steps as Chain-of-Thought (CoT).
By Hengyu Fu, Tianyu Guo, Zixuan Wang, Hanlin Zhu, Jason D. Lee, Jiantao Jiao, Stuart Russell, Song Mei
Large language models can solve complex multi‑hop tasks but often fail on simple two‑hop queries, even when each hop is individually correct. In a controlled symbolic setting, the authors find that models generalize reliably when the second hop follows the training distribution, but always fail when it deviates. Mechanistic analysis shows that successful generalization relies on consistent intermediate representations across contexts, whereas failures arise from a mismatch between lower‑layer representation construction and upper‑layer mapping to outputs. The study proposes a recurrent‑style training strategy that improves out‑of‑distribution two‑hop generalization.
By Zili Zhang, Yilin Wang, Heng Wang, Herun Wan, Minnan Luo
arXiv:2608. 08113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the dominant paradigm for eliciting reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it creates substantial computational overhead by forcing models to externalize intermediate reasoning steps as discrete tokens.
By Abhishek Panwar, Maheep Singh, Saksham Bansal
arXiv:2609.36636v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Looped language models (LoopLMs) increase computational depth through parameter sharing, offering a path to scale inference computation without adding...
By Xinlin Zhuang, Siyuan Wang, Imran Razzak, Weiyang Liu
The paper investigates whether different forms of intermediate computation in large language models—such as token-based traces, pause tokens, and latent reasoning—rely on the same underlying mechanism. By training five variants of GPTNeoX on an extended multi-hop reasoning task, the authors find that while vanilla, Chain-of-Thought, and Pause Token models perform well on in-distribution data, they fail to generalize to longer-hop out-of-distribution problems. In contrast, latent-reasoning models exhibit better depth generalization, with causal analysis revealing a sparse recurrent search circuit that implements forward reachability propagation across the graph.
The paper investigates how different forms of compressed chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning—Explicit, Composed, and Implicit—affect large language model (LLM) performance after supervised fine‑tuning (SFT). Using a synthetic compositional reasoning task, the authors show that coarser CoT requires more SFT data, that Composed and Implicit CoT benefit more from data scaling (with Composed also benefiting from repetition), and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can decompose compressed steps learned during SFT. Additionally, unidirectional CoT ordering improves generalization on longer sequential tasks.
By Kohsei Matsutani, Gouki Minegishi, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
arXiv:2607. 25915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Complex structured reasoning tasks often require additional computation, yet current language models obtain it mainly by increasing parameter scale or by serializing intermediate steps as chain-of-thought (CoT) tokens.
By Yutong Chen, Shouqian Shi, Xinran Liu, Haochen Wang, Jiaying Wang, Tianxing Xu, Yuanxi Wang, Zirui Ding
arXiv:2610.00571v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved substantial improvements in solving complex mathematical problems, but often produce lengthy, repetitive,...
By Barproda Halder, Qiuyi Zhang, Sanghamitra Dutta
arXiv:2505. 20161v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Effective generalization in language models depends critically on the diversity of their training data.
By Jaehun Jung, Seungju Han, Ximing Lu, Skyler Hallinan, David Acuna, Shrimai Prabhumoye, Mostafa Patwary, Mohammad Shoeybi, Bryan Catanzaro, Yejin Choi
arXiv:2602. 01997v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work has shown that layer pruning can effectively compress large language models (LLMs) while retaining strong performance on classification benchmarks, often with little or no finetuning.
By Safal Shrestha, Anubhav Shrestha, Minwu Kim, Aadim Nepal, Keith Ross
arXiv:2606. 03217v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become a widely used mechanism for eliciting multi-step reasoning in large language models by generating intermediate reasoning steps at inference time.
By Kaito Takanami, Cengiz Pehlevan