Blind Spot Navigation in Large Language Model Reasoning with Thought Space Explorer
- URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2410.24155v3
- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2025 21:51:08 GMT
- Title: Blind Spot Navigation in Large Language Model Reasoning with Thought Space Explorer
- Authors: Jinghan Zhang, Fengran Mo, Tharindu Cyril Weerasooriya, Yeyang Zhou, Xinyue Ye, Dongjie Wang, Yanjie Fu, Kunpeng Liu,
- Abstract summary: We introduce the Thought Space Explorer'' (TSE) to expand and optimize thought structures for large language models (LLMs)<n>By generating new reasoning steps and branches based on the original thought structure, TSE broadens the thought exploration view and alleviates the impact of blind spots for LLM reasoning.
- Score: 35.8785976088927
- License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
- Abstract: Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their potential in handling complex reasoning tasks, which are usually achieved by constructing a thought chain to guide the model in solving the problem with multi-step thinking. However, existing methods often remain confined to previously explored solution spaces and thus overlook the critical blind spot within LLMs' cognitive range. To address these issues, we introduce the ``Thought Space Explorer'' (TSE), a novel framework to expand and optimize thought structures to guide LLMs to explore their blind spots of thinking. By generating new reasoning steps and branches based on the original thought structure with various designed strategies, TSE broadens the thought exploration view and alleviates the impact of blind spots for LLM reasoning. Experimental results on multiple levels of reasoning tasks demonstrate the efficacy of TSE by surpassing various baseline methods. We also conduct extensive analysis to understand how structured and expansive thought can contribute to unleashing the potential of LLM reasoning capabilities.
Related papers
- Neural Chain-of-Thought Search: Searching the Optimal Reasoning Path to Enhance Large Language Models [61.55758048622473]
We introduce Neural Chain-of-Thought Search (NCoTS), a framework that reformulates reasoning as a dynamic search for the optimal thinking strategy.<n>By quantitatively characterizing the solution space, we reveal the existence of sparse superior reasoning paths that are simultaneously more accurate and concise than standard outputs.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-01-16T14:38:18Z) - Reinforced Efficient Reasoning via Semantically Diverse Exploration [73.41112984160992]
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has proven effective in enhancing the reasoning of large language models (LLMs)<n>We propose reinforced efficient reasoning via semantically diverse explorations, i.e., ROSE, for LLMs.<n>Our method incorporates a semantic-entropy-based branching strategy and an $varepsilon$-exploration mechanism.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2026-01-08T15:56:44Z) - A Survey on Parallel Reasoning [58.66122129692264]
We first present a formal definition of parallel reasoning and clarify its distinction from related concepts like Chain-of-Thought.<n>We then organize and discuss advanced techniques based on a novel taxonomy, including non-interactive reasoning, interactive reasoning, and efficiency-focused decoding strategies.<n>We highlight the core challenges of parallel reasoning and suggest potential directions for future research.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-14T05:42:19Z) - Constraints-of-Thought: A Framework for Constrained Reasoning in Language-Model-Guided Search [3.0130126601831235]
Constraints-of-Thought (Const-o-T) is a framework that enables Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) focus search on semantically meaningful paths.<n>We demonstrate that Const-o-T offers a generalizable foundation for constraint-guided reasoning, enabling more efficient, constraint-aligned, and domain-adaptable planning.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-10-10T04:21:18Z) - What Makes a Good Reasoning Chain? Uncovering Structural Patterns in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning [45.660562905010934]
We present LCoT2Tree, an automated framework that converts sequential LCoTs into hierarchical tree structures.<n>Using graph neural networks (GNNs), we reveal that structural patterns extracted by LCoT2Tree serve as stronger predictors of final performance.<n>Our results underscore the critical role of internal structures of reasoning chains, positioning LCoT2Tree as a powerful tool for diagnosing, interpreting, and improving reasoning in LLMs.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-28T09:12:31Z) - Reasoning LLMs are Wandering Solution Explorers [5.3795217858078805]
This paper formalizes what constitutes systematic problem solving and identifies common failure modes that reveal reasoning LLMs to be wanderers rather than systematic explorers.<n>Our findings suggest that current models' performance can appear to be competent on simple tasks yet degrade sharply as complexity increases.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-26T17:59:53Z) - Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning [29.836545690130478]
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive performance on complex tasks through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning.<n>There has been growing research interest in textitlatent CoT reasoning, where the reasoning process is embedded within latent spaces.<n>This paper aims to present a comprehensive overview of this emerging paradigm and establish a systematic taxonomy.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-22T15:26:51Z) - ToTRL: Unlock LLM Tree-of-Thoughts Reasoning Potential through Puzzles Solving [4.987786842464663]
Tree-of-thoughts (ToT) offers a conceptually more advanced approach by modeling reasoning as an exploration within a tree structure.<n>ToTRL is designed to guide LLMs in developing the parallel ToT strategy based on the sequential CoT strategy.<n>Our ToTQwen3-8B model, trained with ToTRL, achieves significant improvement in performance and reasoning efficiency on complex reasoning tasks.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-05-19T05:18:58Z) - LLMs are Greedy Agents: Effects of RL Fine-tuning on Decision-Making Abilities [21.42711537107199]
We study why Large Language Models (LLMs) perform sub-optimally in decision-making scenarios.
We propose mitigation of these shortcomings by fine-tuning via Reinforcement Learning (RL) on self-generated CoT rationales.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-04-22T17:57:14Z) - A Call for New Recipes to Enhance Spatial Reasoning in MLLMs [85.67171333213301]
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in general vision-language tasks.
Recent studies have exposed critical limitations in their spatial reasoning capabilities.
This deficiency in spatial reasoning significantly constrains MLLMs' ability to interact effectively with the physical world.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-04-21T11:48:39Z) - Guiding Reasoning in Small Language Models with LLM Assistance [23.3038074903744]
Small Language Models cast doubt suitability for tasks demanding deep, multi-step logical deduction.
This paper introduces a framework called Small Reasons, Large Hints, which selectively augments SLM reasoning with targeted guidance from large language models.
Our experiments on mathematical reasoning datasets demonstrate that targeted external scaffolding significantly improves performance.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-04-14T06:32:45Z) - CrossWordBench: Evaluating the Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs and LVLMs with Controllable Puzzle Generation [53.452699232071495]
CrossWordBench is a benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) through the medium of crossword puzzles.<n>Our evaluation reveals that reasoning LLMs outperform non-reasoning models substantially by effectively leveraging crossing-letter constraints.<n>Our findings offer insights into the limitations of the reasoning capabilities of current LLMs and LVLMs, and provide an effective approach for creating multimodal constrained tasks for future evaluations.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-03-30T20:03:36Z) - SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMs [48.28847964704554]
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks.
We propose a novel approach for continuous-space reasoning that does not require modifying the underlying LLM.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-02-17T18:52:29Z) - Satori: Reinforcement Learning with Chain-of-Action-Thought Enhances LLM Reasoning via Autoregressive Search [57.28671084993782]
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities across diverse domains.
Recent studies have shown that increasing test-time computation enhances LLMs' reasoning capabilities.
We propose a two-stage training paradigm: 1) a small-scale format tuning stage to internalize the COAT reasoning format and 2) a large-scale self-improvement stage leveraging reinforcement learning.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2025-02-04T17:26:58Z) - RAG-Star: Enhancing Deliberative Reasoning with Retrieval Augmented Verification and Refinement [85.08223786819532]
Existing large language models (LLMs) show exceptional problem-solving capabilities but might struggle with complex reasoning tasks.
We propose textbfRAG-Star, a novel RAG approach that integrates retrieved information to guide the tree-based deliberative reasoning process.
Our experiments involving Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct and GPT-4o demonstrate that RAG-Star significantly outperforms previous RAG and reasoning methods.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-12-17T13:05:36Z) - Reversal of Thought: Enhancing Large Language Models with Preference-Guided Reverse Reasoning Warm-up [9.42385235462794]
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in reasoning tasks but face limitations in mathematical and complex logical reasoning.
We propose Reversal of Thought (RoT), a novel framework aimed at enhancing the logical reasoning abilities of LLMs.
RoT utilizes a Preference-Guided Reverse Reasoning warm-up strategy, which integrates logical symbols for pseudocode planning.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-10-16T07:44:28Z) - Unlocking the Capabilities of Thought: A Reasoning Boundary Framework to Quantify and Optimize Chain-of-Thought [61.588465852846646]
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has emerged as a promising approach for enhancing the performance of large language models (LLMs)
In this work, we introduce a novel reasoning boundary framework (RBF) to address these challenges.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-10-08T05:26:28Z) - Cognitive LLMs: Towards Integrating Cognitive Architectures and Large Language Models for Manufacturing Decision-making [51.737762570776006]
LLM-ACTR is a novel neuro-symbolic architecture that provides human-aligned and versatile decision-making.
Our framework extracts and embeds knowledge of ACT-R's internal decision-making process as latent neural representations.
Our experiments on novel Design for Manufacturing tasks show both improved task performance as well as improved grounded decision-making capability.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-08-17T11:49:53Z) - Fine-Tuning on Diverse Reasoning Chains Drives Within-Inference CoT Refinement in LLMs [63.36637269634553]
We introduce a novel approach where LLMs are fine-tuned to generate a sequence of Diverse Chains of Thought (DCoT) within a single inference step.<n>We show that fine-tuning on DCoT improves performance over the CoT baseline across model families and scales.<n>Our work is also significant because both quantitative analyses and manual evaluations reveal the observed gains stem from the models' ability to refine an initial reasoning chain.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-07-03T15:01:18Z) - Cantor: Inspiring Multimodal Chain-of-Thought of MLLM [83.6663322930814]
We argue that converging visual context acquisition and logical reasoning is pivotal for tackling visual reasoning tasks.
We propose an innovative multimodal CoT framework, termed Cantor, characterized by a perception-decision architecture.
Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed framework, showing significant improvements in multimodal CoT performance.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-04-24T17:59:48Z) - Exploring Concept Depth: How Large Language Models Acquire Knowledge at Different Layers? [57.04803703952721]
Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performances across a wide range of tasks.
However, the mechanisms by which these models encode tasks of varying complexities remain poorly understood.
We introduce the idea of Concept Depth'' to suggest that more complex concepts are typically acquired in deeper layers.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-04-10T14:56:40Z) - Beyond Lines and Circles: Unveiling the Geometric Reasoning Gap in Large
Language Models [28.819559978685806]
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate ever-increasing abilities in mathematical and algorithmic tasks, yet their geometric reasoning skills are underexplored.
We investigate LLMs' abilities in constructive geometric problem-solving one of the most fundamental steps in the development of human mathematical reasoning.
Our work reveals notable challenges that the state-of-the-art LLMs face in this domain despite many successes in similar areas.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-02-06T10:37:21Z) - Demystifying Chains, Trees, and Graphs of Thoughts [20.980650840083385]
We focus on identifying fundamental classes of harnessed structures, and we analyze the representations of these structures.
Our study compares existing prompting schemes using the proposed taxonomy, discussing how certain design choices lead to different patterns in performance and cost.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2024-01-25T16:34:00Z) - Everything of Thoughts: Defying the Law of Penrose Triangle for Thought
Generation [42.472954457731355]
We introduce a novel thought prompting approach called "Everything of Thoughts" (XoT) to defy the law of "Penrose triangle of existing thought paradigms.
XoT leverages pretrained reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to incorporate external domain knowledge into thoughts.
We evaluate XoT on several challenging multi-solution problem-solving tasks, including Game of 24, 8-Puzzle, and Pocket Cube.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-11-07T12:30:36Z) - Towards LogiGLUE: A Brief Survey and A Benchmark for Analyzing Logical Reasoning Capabilities of Language Models [56.34029644009297]
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to overcome various limitations of formal Knowledge Representation (KR) systems.
LLMs excel most in abductive reasoning, followed by deductive reasoning, while they are least effective at inductive reasoning.
We study single-task training, multi-task training, and "chain-of-thought" knowledge distillation fine-tuning technique to assess the performance of model.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-10-02T01:00:50Z) - Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate [85.3444184685235]
We propose a Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) framework, in which multiple agents express their arguments in the state of "tit for tat" and a judge manages the debate process to obtain a final solution.
Our framework encourages divergent thinking in LLMs which would be helpful for tasks that require deep levels of contemplation.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-05-30T15:25:45Z) - Exploring Self-supervised Logic-enhanced Training for Large Language Models [59.227222647741094]
In this paper, we make the first attempt to investigate the feasibility of incorporating logical knowledge through self-supervised post-training.
We devise an auto-regressive objective variant of MERIt and integrate it with two LLM series, i.e., FLAN-T5 and LLaMA, with parameter size ranging from 3 billion to 13 billion.
The results on two challenging logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of LogicLLM.
arXiv Detail & Related papers (2023-05-23T06:13:10Z)
This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.
This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.