Read Before You Think: Mitigating LLM Comprehension Failures with Step-by-Step Reading

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.09402v2
• Date: Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:32:59 GMT
• Title: Read Before You Think: Mitigating LLM Comprehension Failures with Step-by-Step Reading
• Authors: Feijiang Han, Hengtao Cui, Licheng Guo, Zelong Wang, Zhiyuan Lyu,
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail on complex reasoning tasks due to flawed question comprehension.<n>This paper presents a systematic investigation into these comprehension failures.<n>We introduce the Step-by-Step Reading (SSR) family of prompts.
• Score: 2.073147245888634
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) often fail on complex reasoning tasks due to flawed question comprehension, not just flawed logic. This paper presents a systematic investigation into these comprehension failures. Our work yields three key insights: (1) the step-by-step principle, effective for calculation, can be migrated to the reading process to enhance comprehension; (2) increasing the proportion of question-related tokens (e.g., via repetition) succeeds by refocusing attention, a mechanism that can be explicitly controlled; and (3) backward dependencies represent a core bottleneck for decoder-only models that persists even with strong methods like Chain-of-Thought. Based on these findings, we introduce the Step-by-Step Reading (SSR) family of prompts. This multi-stage approach culminates in SSR++, a method specifically engineered to deepen model comprehension by guiding it to parse questions with finer granularity, focus attention on critical tokens, and resolve backward dependencies through iterative re-contextualization. SSR++ sets a new state-of-the-art on multiple reasoning benchmarks, and our analysis confirms it works by directly mitigating semantic misunderstanding. These results demonstrate that guiding how a model reads is a powerful and efficient method for improving its reasoning ability.

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