Challenge: Language models have already made good progress on this benchmark, with the best model outperforming average reported human-rater results on 65% of the BIG-Bench tasks.
Approach: They propose to use chain-of-thought prompting to challenge language models on 23 challenging BIG-Bench tasks which they call BIG-Bench Hard.
Outcome: The proposed language models outperform the average human-rater on 65% of the BIG-Bench tasks.

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CoF-CoT: Enhancing Large Language Models with Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Multi-domain NLU Tasks (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Chain-of-Thought prompting is popular in reasoning tasks, but its application to Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is under-explored.
Approach: They propose a Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought approach that breaks down NLU tasks into multiple reasoning steps where LLMs can learn to acquire essential concepts.
Outcome: The proposed approach is effective in assisting the LLMs adapt to multi-grained NLU tasks under zero-shot and few-shot multi-domain settings.
BIG-Bench Extra Hard (2025.acl-long)

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Challenge: Current benchmarks for large language model reasoning focus on math and coding abilities, leaving a gap in evaluating broader reasoning proficiencies.
Approach: They propose a benchmark to evaluate general reasoning in large language models . they use BIG-Bench and its harder version BIG-Benefit Hard to assess general reasoning .
Outcome: The new benchmark pushes the boundaries of LLM reasoning evaluation.
What Makes Chain-of-Thought Prompting Effective? A Counterfactual Study (2023.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Using a few-shot prompt, we examine the effects of symbols and patterns on in-context learning in large language models.
Approach: They employ a counterfactual prompting approach by manipulating examples and testing the consequences on model behavior.
Outcome: The proposed approach allows us to understand the relative contributions of symbols and patterns on in-context learning.
Towards Understanding Chain-of-Thought Prompting: An Empirical Study of What Matters (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting can dramatically improve the multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs).
Approach: They propose to use Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting to encourage the LLM to generate intermediate rationales for solving a problem by providing a series of reasoning steps in the demonstrations.
Outcome: The proposed model can generate coherent lines of reasoning even with invalid demonstrations while still generating coherent lines during inference.
The CoT Collection: Improving Zero-shot and Few-shot Learning of Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Fine-Tuning (2023.emnlp-main)

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Challenge: Language models with less than 100B parameters perform poorly on chain-of-thought reasoning . we aim to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step reasoning capability .
Approach: They propose to equip smaller LMs with the step-by-step reasoning capability by tuning with CoT rationales.
Outcome: The proposed dataset outperforms large LMs on 4 domain-specific tasks even with demonstrations .
Think Less, Code Better: Probing When Chain-of-Thought Hurts and How to Route Around It (2026.acl-srw)

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Challenge: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting is the dominant strategy for eliciting step-by-step reasoning in large language models, but its effect on code generation is poorly understood.
Approach: They develop a chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting router that selects among 12 prompt styles via a single 84 ms forward pass.
Outcome: The proposed model outperforms CoT in small models with a 84 ms forward pass.
Enhancing Chain-of-Thoughts Prompting with Iterative Bootstrapping in Large Language Models (2024.findings-naacl)

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Challenge: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting is a technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) however, the reasoning chains of demonstrations are observed to be prone to errors, which can lead to incorrect reasoning during inference.
Approach: They propose an iterative bootstrapping technique to enhance the reasoning abilities of Large language models (LLMs) by generating a series of reasoning steps to obtain the answer, and using the reasoning chains as exemplars to demonstrate the task.
Outcome: The proposed method improves the performance of Large language models (LLMs) on three reasoning tasks on ten datasets.
ChainLM: Empowering Large Language Models with Improved Chain-of-Thought Prompting (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: Existing CoT synthesis approaches focus on simpler reasoning tasks and result in inconsistent CoT prompts.
Approach: They propose a framework for automatic generation of superior CoT prompts based on three major evolution strategies . they propose 'step-level debating' method where multiple debaters discuss each reasoning step to arrive at the correct answer.
Outcome: The proposed framework can generate superior CoT prompts from a CoT dataset.
Look Light, Think Heavy: What Multimodal Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Can and Cannot Do (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing open-source models often yield only marginal overall improvements, possibly due to an overemphasis on mathematical reasoning at the expense of broader capabilities.
Approach: They evaluate 12 multimodal tasks using 14 non-reasoning models and 8 reasoning models.
Outcome: The proposed method is effective in multimodal reasoning tasks, the authors show . they show that it lacks the ability to maintain deep visual introspection throughout the reasoning process.
ReEfBench: Quantifying the Reasoning Efficiency of LLMs (2026.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing methods for Chain-of-Thought evaluations do not distinguish between genuine reasoning and mere verbosity.
Approach: They propose a framework for the non-intrusive, comprehensive process-centric evaluation of reasoning grounded in First-Order Logic.
Outcome: The proposed framework identifies four distinct behavioral prototypes and diagnoses the failure modes.

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