CoT Reasoning

CoT: Chain-of-Thought

Ask about this topic

Overview

Chain-of-thought reasoning studies how language models break complex problems into steps, use intermediate information, and produce answers that can be checked or acted on. Approaches include prompting models to show their work, training on reasoning traces with supervised learning or reinforcement learning, and using structured methods such as code, symbolic rules, trees, or latent reasoning states. Researchers test these methods on tasks including mathematics, multi-hop question answering, coding, clinical decisions, and visual or spatial understanding, while developing verification and adaptive-compute methods to control cost. A central tension is that longer or more detailed traces do not reliably improve accuracy or explain how a model reached its answer; they can also amplify errors, bias, or unsupported claims.

Latest papers

CardsList

228 papers25 papers in the last four weeks, up 56% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. REACT: Representational Early Analysis and Control of Chain-of-Thought Trajectories

    Oct 23, 2026Hanwen Zhang, Enyi Jiang, Ruike Zhu +2LLM SafetyCausal Interventions in Language Models

    Independent Researcher · Stanford University · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  2. Transformers with CoT Discover Heavy-Ball Acceleration Through Training

    Oct 22, 2026Yuxuan Cai, Yuan CaoCoT ReasoningNeural Algorithmic Reasoning

    School of Computing & Data Science, The University of Hong Kong

  3. Speculative Acceptance Does Not Decay with Position: A Full-Length Diagnostic on Long Chain-of-Thought with Independent Drafts

    Oct 22, 2026Zhiming MengSpeculative DecodingCoT Reasoning

  4. Mitigating Query Shortcuts in Chain-of-Thought with Context-Aware Decoding

    Oct 21, 2026Shin'ya YamaguchiCoT ReasoningFaithfulness of Language Model Reasoning

    NTT

  5. Sparse RL Relaxation for LLM Reasoning

    Oct 19, 2026Jiabin Fan, Matthias Lindemann, Zita Marinho +2CoT ReasoningRL for Language Model Reasoning

    University of Alberta · Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) · Instituto de Telecomunicações +3

  6. Internalizing Chain-of-thought into Looped Transformers

    Oct 19, 2026Kehang Zhou, Pinyan LuRecurrent TransformersLatent Reasoning

    Institute for Theoretical Computer Science Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

  7. GLOBE: Geometry-Led Online Behavioral Early Exit via Unit-Sphere Trajectories

    Oct 19, 2026Xinyue Peng, Zhenlin Liang, Meng Cai +1Efficient Language Model ReasoningCoT Reasoning

    Moore Threads

  8. Computation, Not Memory: Chain-of-Thought and State Tracking in LLM Agents

    Oct 19, 2026Pedram Mouseli, Massieh MoayediCoT ReasoningMulti-Turn Language Model Reasoning

    University of Toronto

  9. Think Visually Across Space and Time: Grounded Reasoning for Video Segmentation

    Oct 18, 2026Junwei Wen, Deshui Miao, Guangming Lu +3Temporal Reasoning in VLMsVideo Object Segmentation

    Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen · University of California at Merced · Pengcheng Laboratory +1

  10. The Density of Thought: Predicting and Steering Reasoning in Large Language Models

    Oct 15, 2026Tanush Kalhan, Anupam Chattopadhyay, Sriram Ranga +1Language Model SteeringCoT Reasoning

    Plaksha University · Nanyang Technological University · Interview Street Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (HackerRank) +1

  11. CoTranslator: Reverse to Forward Chain-of-Thought Translator for Reasoning Distillation

    Oct 14, 2026Zinan Tang, Zhuoshi Pan, Kairui Chen +5CoT DistillationLanguage Model Distillation

    Tsinghua University · Ant Group · Xiaomi Corporation

  12. Frustratingly Easy Majority Voting Using Length Conditioning

    Oct 14, 2026Fiorenzo Parascandolo, Enver Sangineto, Xiaoyi Yu +4LLM ReasoningEfficient Language Model Reasoning

    University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy · University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy · Gaoling School of Artificial Intelligence, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

  13. Integrating Simulation and Chain-of-thought Reasoning in Multimodal-Language Models For Physical Reasoning

    Oct 14, 2026YingQiao Wang, Eric Bigelow, Tomer Ullman +2Multimodal ReasoningCoT Reasoning

    Department of Psychology, Harvard University · Sakana AI · Goodfire AI

  14. The Surprising Expressivity of a Single Neuron with Autoregressive Chain-of-Thought

    Oct 12, 2026Roey Magen, Nirmit Joshi, Gal VardiNeural Network ExpressivityCoT Reasoning

    Weizmann Institute of Science · Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago

  15. Reasoning for Propaganda Detection via Label-Guided CoT Optimisation

    Oct 12, 2026Zeba Afroz, Harsh Vardhan, Md. Shad AkhtarExplainable Text ClassificationCoT Reasoning

    Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi

  16. One-Layer Transformers Provably Learn In-Context K-Nearest Neighbor Prediction with Chain-of-Thought

    Oct 12, 2026Lyumin Wu, Yuan CaoTransformerIn-Context Learning

    School of Computing & Data Science, The University of Hong Kong

  17. Learning More by Training Less: Uncertainty-Guided Progressive Contraction for Efficient Reasoning Post-Training

    Oct 9, 2026Suorong Yang, Jiaxin Wang, Jiaming Su +4Efficient Language Model ReasoningEfficient Language Model Training

    National University of Singapore · Nanjing University · Fudan University +3

  18. Visible Reasoning Is Not a Universal Optimizer: Persona- and Thinking-Dependent Effects in Analytics Code Generation

    Oct 7, 2026Bhawani Shankar Leelar, Pawan Chorasiya, Davin Hill +2CoT ReasoningLLM Code Generation

    Optum AI

  19. Plan Canvas: Fixed Reasoning Regions for Continuous Language Flows

    Oct 5, 2026Miaohe Niu, Pengxiang Li, Jingbo Zhu +1LLM Reasoning with GraphsCoT Reasoning

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, China · Hong Kong Polytechnic University, China · NiuTrans Research, Shenyang, China

  20. Spend Bytes on Breadth: Precision-Count Trade-offs for Decode-Time KV Compression in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning

    Oct 5, 2026Runguo LiCoT ReasoningKV-Cache Eviction

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  21. Agentic AI with Structured CoT for Enhancing AI's Spatial Intelligence: Visualization and Reasoning of Rotation

    Oct 3, 2026Uttamasha Monjoree, Wei YanSpatial Reasoning BenchmarksStructured CoT Reasoning

    Department of Architecture, Texas A&M University, College Station, USA

  22. Cog-VADU: A Training-Free Cognitive Reasoning Framework for Video Anomaly Detection and Understanding

    Oct 1, 2026Mohd Ubaid Wani, Sara Atito, Josef Kittler +1CoT ReasoningInterpretable Anomaly Detection

    Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing (CVSSP) University of Surrey, UK · Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI (PAI) University of Surrey, UK

  23. RATIO: Reasoning Analysis and Token-level Inference Optimization for Quantized Reasoning Models

    Sep 30, 2026Chengzhu Bao, Xianglong Yan, Tianao Zhang +3LLM QuantizationOverthinking in Language Models

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  24. Structure vs. Chain-of-Thought: Evaluating LLM Criteria Extraction for Depression Severity

    Sep 30, 2026Xinkai ChenDepression DetectionCoT Reasoning

    Independent Researcher

  25. Targeted Retrieval, Compact Representations: How CoT Reasoning Improves Long-Context Counting

    Sep 30, 2026Liang Twist Shan, Tianyu Hu, Hao Yan +1Numerical Reasoning in Language ModelsLong-Context Retrieval

    Department of Statistics, University of Wisconsin-Madison · Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison

  26. Allspark: Weak to Strong Transfer via Alternating Chain of Thought

    Sep 26, 2026Kaizhao Liang, Junxiong Wang, Chen Liang +2Weak-to-Strong GeneralizationTransfer Learning

    UT Austin · Together AI · Microsoft

  27. Does Thinking Help Fairness? Reasoning Tokens Resolve Some Biases but Create More

    Sep 25, 2026Deng Pan, Joe Germino, Yihong Ma +4Social Bias in Language ModelsLanguage Model Bias Evaluation

    University of Notre Dame · IBM Research, Dublin

  28. Reasoning Instructions Can Break Answer Decoding in Vision--Language Models

    Sep 24, 2026Zeyan Li, Siyuan Qiu, Jianfeng XuVLM EvaluationLanguage Model Generation Evaluation

    Shanghai Jiao Tong University

  29. LEGO: Synergizing Expert GraphRAG and Expert Chain-of-Thought for Legal Reasoning

    Sep 22, 2026Qingjing Chen, Junkai Zhang, Shaochun Wang +7LLM Reasoning with GraphsGraph Retrieval-Augmented Generation

    Alma AI, University of Bologna, Italy · Tsinghua University, China · Modelbest Inc. +2

  30. Capable yet Parsimonious: Extracting and Characterizing Hidden Chain-of-Thought in Frontier Models

    Sep 22, 2026Xiaoyu Luo, Tao Ren, Wenrui Yu +3LLM InterpretabilityCoT Reasoning

    Department of Computer Science Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark · Department of Electronic Systems Aalborg University, Copenhagen, Denmark · Seafill