SFT supplies entangled compositional traces of atomic skills and routing modules; RL identifies those modules and enables recombination on novel compositions outside the SFT support.
Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens
8 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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Pith papers citing it
abstract
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to be effective in eliciting structured reasoning (i.e., CoT reasoning) from large language models (LLMs). Regardless of its popularity, recent studies expose its failures in some reasoning tasks, raising fundamental questions about the nature of CoT reasoning. In this work, we propose a data distribution lens to understand when and why CoT reasoning succeeds or fails. We hypothesize that CoT reasoning reflects a structured inductive bias learned from in-distribution data, enabling models to conditionally generate reasoning trajectories that approximate those observed during training. As such, the effectiveness of CoT reasoning is fundamentally governed by the nature and degree of distribution discrepancy between training data and test queries. Guided by this lens, we dissect CoT reasoning via three dimensions: task, length, and format. To test the hypothesis, we introduce DataAlchemy, an abstract and fully controllable environment that trains LLMs from scratch and systematically probes them under various distribution conditions. Through rigorous controlled experiments, we reveal that CoT reasoning is a brittle mirage when it is pushed beyond training distributions, emphasizing the ongoing challenge of achieving genuine and generalizable reasoning.
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2026 8roles
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CIE-Scorer detects unfaithful CoT by tracing compact sentence-level circuits, building internal-external reasoning graphs, and scoring their discrepancy with Fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance, reporting SOTA results on FaithCoT-Bench with reduced circuit cost.
No existing AI security framework covers a majority of the 193 identified multi-agent system threats in any category, with OWASP Agentic Security Initiative achieving the highest overall coverage at 65.3%.
Applies optimal transport to bound OOD generalization error in Transformers via Lipschitz continuity and TC^0 circuit depth lower bounds for Dyck-k backtracking, supported by evaluations on 54 configurations.
Absurd World automatically converts real-world problems into absurd yet logically coherent scenarios to test whether LLMs can reason without depending on familiar patterns.
SAVeR adds self-auditing of internal beliefs in LLM agents via persona-based candidates and constraint-guided repairs, improving faithfulness on six benchmarks without hurting task performance.
PICCO is a five-element reference architecture (Persona, Instructions, Context, Constraints, Output) for structuring LLM prompts, derived from synthesizing prior frameworks along with a taxonomy distinguishing prompt concepts.
citing papers explorer
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From Reasoning Traces to Reusable Modules: Understanding Compositional Generalization in Language Model Reasoning
SFT supplies entangled compositional traces of atomic skills and routing modules; RL identifies those modules and enables recombination on novel compositions outside the SFT support.
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Detecting Unfaithful Chain-of-Thought via Circuit-Guided Internal-External Discrepancy
CIE-Scorer detects unfaithful CoT by tracing compact sentence-level circuits, building internal-external reasoning graphs, and scoring their discrepancy with Fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance, reporting SOTA results on FaithCoT-Bench with reduced circuit cost.
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Security Considerations for Multi-agent Systems
No existing AI security framework covers a majority of the 193 identified multi-agent system threats in any category, with OWASP Agentic Security Initiative achieving the highest overall coverage at 65.3%.
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A Measure-Theoretic Analysis of Reasoning: Structural Generalization and Approximation Limits
Applies optimal transport to bound OOD generalization error in Transformers via Lipschitz continuity and TC^0 circuit depth lower bounds for Dyck-k backtracking, supported by evaluations on 54 configurations.
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Absurd World: A Simple Yet Powerful Method to Absurdify the Real-world for Probing LLM Reasoning Capabilities
Absurd World automatically converts real-world problems into absurd yet logically coherent scenarios to test whether LLMs can reason without depending on familiar patterns.
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Verify Before You Commit: Towards Faithful Reasoning in LLM Agents via Self-Auditing
SAVeR adds self-auditing of internal beliefs in LLM agents via persona-based candidates and constraint-guided repairs, improving faithfulness on six benchmarks without hurting task performance.
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The PICCO Framework for Large Language Model Prompting: A Taxonomy and Reference Architecture for Prompt Structure
PICCO is a five-element reference architecture (Persona, Instructions, Context, Constraints, Output) for structuring LLM prompts, derived from synthesizing prior frameworks along with a taxonomy distinguishing prompt concepts.
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