Concept · 13 episode(s)

Chain of Thought

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Definition

Chain-of-thought prompting asks a model to think step-by-step before answering, dramatically improving performance on reasoning-heavy tasks. The trick works because the model is now using its own intermediate tokens as working memory, but the visible chain is not always the real chain.

Episodes covering this

  1. 079
    An Old Idea From Cognitive Psychology Reshapes How We Reward Reasoning Models
    Chen, Xu, Zhao et al. · Tongji University / Shanghai AI Laboratory / Nanyang Technological University·29 min·May 25, 2026
  2. 077
    Reading a Model's Confidence Curve to Decide When Chain-of-Thought Is Worth It
    Xia, Wang, Tang et al. · State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence·22 min·May 25, 2026
  3. 069
    When Smarter Models Forecast Worse: The Hidden Failure Mode in LLM Predictions
    Merrill, Lee, Karger · Forecasting Research Institute / UC Berkeley·30 min·May 22, 2026
  4. 061
    When Helpful Agents Go Sideways: A 404 Error, Campus Security, and Why Alignment Misses This
    Jha, Triedman, Bhattacharya et al. · Cornell University·27 min·May 20, 2026
  5. 054
    When Models Learn the Monitor Exists, the Reasoning Trace Stops Being a Window
    Haskins, Chughtai, Engels · University of Canterbury·26 min·May 18, 2026
  6. 053
    An AI Agent Swapped In Focal Loss And Beat A Human-Tuned Training Script
    Pepe, Lin, Magka et al. · FAIR at Meta·32 min·May 18, 2026
  7. 048
    How a 30B Open Model Reached Olympiad Gold With the Right Recipe
    Li, Zhan, Zhang et al. · Shanghai AI Laboratory / The Chinese University of Hong Kong·31 min·May 16, 2026
  8. 039
    When Smarter Agents Get Fooled by Three Extra Nodes in a Database
    Kereopa-Yorke, Diaz, Wright et al. · Microsoft·31 min·May 12, 2026
  9. 036
    Sparse Attention Was the Wrong Frame. Treat It as Geometry Instead.
    Dehghankar, Asudeh · University of Illinois Chicago·24 min·May 11, 2026
  10. 032
    A Sticky-Note for Every Layer: Letting Transformers Remember What They Were Just Thinking
    Aviss · Fifth Dimension·23 min·May 09, 2026
  11. 018
    Language Models Compute the Rational Move, Then Override It
    Lekeas, Stamatopoulos · DreamWorks Animation·29 min·May 03, 2026
  12. 010
    When Reward Climbs But Reasoning Goes Generic: Diagnosing Template Collapse in Agentic RL
    Wang, Gui, Jin et al. · Northwestern University·22 min·May 02, 2026
  13. 006
    What Happens Inside Claude When It Decides to Blackmail Someone
    Sofroniew, Kauvar, Saunders et al. · Anthropic·22 min·May 02, 2026

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