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 reasoning chain


Cooperative Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Question Answering: Mutual Information Exchange and Ranking by Contrasting Layers

Neural Information Processing Systems

Since large language models (LLMs) have a tendency to generate factually inaccurate output, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has gained significant attention as a key means to mitigate this downside of harnessing only LLMs. However, existing RAG methods for simple and multi-hop question answering (QA) are still prone to incorrect retrievals and hallucinations. To address these limitations, we propose CoopRAG, a novel RAG framework for the QA task in which a retriever and an LLM work cooperatively with each other by exchanging informative knowledge, and the earlier and later layers of the retriever model work cooperatively with each other to accurately rank the retrieved documents relevant to a given query. In this framework, we (i) unroll a question into sub-questions and a reasoning chain in which uncertain positions are masked, (ii) retrieve the documents relevant to the question augmented with the sub-questions and the reasoning chain, (iii) rerank the documents by contrasting layers of the retriever, and (iv) reconstruct the reasoning chain by filling the masked positions via the LLM. Our experiments demonstrate that CoopRAG consistently outperforms state-of-the-art QA methods on three multi-hop QA datasets as well as a simple QA dataset in terms of both the retrieval and QA performances.


Auditing Meta-Cognitive Hallucinations in Reasoning Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

The development of Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) has significantly improved multi-step reasoning capabilities, but it has also made hallucination problems more frequent and harder to eliminate. While existing approaches address hallucination through external knowledge integration, model parameter analysis, or self-verification mechanisms, they fail to provide a comprehensive insight into how hallucinations emerge and evolve throughout the reasoning chain. In this work, we investigate hallucination causality under constrained knowledge domains by auditing the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectory and assessing the model's cognitive confidence in potentially erroneous or biased claims. Analysis reveals that in long-CoT settings, RLLMs may iteratively reinforce biases and errors through flawed reflective processes, ultimately inducing hallucinated reasoning paths. Counterintuitively, even with interventions at hallucination origins, reasoning chains display pronounced "chain disloyalty", resisting correction and sustaining flawed trajectories. We further point out that existing hallucination detection methods are less reliable and interpretable than previously assumed, especially in complex multi-step reasoning contexts. Unlike circuit tracing that requires access to model parameters, our auditing enables more interpretable long-chain hallucination attribution in black-box settings, demonstrating stronger generalizability and practical utility. Our code is available at this link.


LIMOPro: Reasoning Refinement for Efficient and Effective Test-time Scaling

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities through test-time scaling approaches, particularly when fine-tuned with chain-of-thought (CoT) data distilled from more powerful large reasoning models (LRMs). However, these reasoning chains often contain verbose elements that mirror human problem-solving, categorized as progressive reasoning (the essential solution development path) and functional elements (verification processes, alternative solution approaches, and error corrections). While progressive reasoning is crucial, the functional elements significantly increase computational demands during test-time inference. We introduce PIR (Perplexity-based Importance Refinement), a principled framework that quantitatively evaluates the importance of each reasoning step based on its impact on answer prediction confidence. PIR systematically identifies and selectively prunes only low-importance functional steps while preserving progressive reasoning components, creating optimized training data that maintains the integrity of the core solution path while reducing verbosity. Models fine-tuned on PIR-optimized data exhibit superior test-time scaling properties, generating more concise reasoning chains while achieving improved accuracy (+0.9% to +6.6%) with significantly reduced token usage (-3% to -41%) across challenging reasoning benchmarks (AIME, AMC, and GPQA Diamond). Our approach demonstrates strong generalizability across different model sizes, data sources, and token budgets, offering a practical solution for deploying reasoningcapable LLMs in scenarios where efficient test-time scaling, response time, and computational efficiency are valuable constraints. Code and dataset are available at the LIMOPro.


Guiding LLMDecision-Making with Fairness Reward Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models are increasingly used to support high-stakes decisions, potentially influencing who is granted bail or receives a loan. Naive chain-ofthought sampling can improve average decision accuracy, but has also been shown to amplify unfair bias. To address this challenge and enable the trustworthy use of reasoning models in high-stakes decision-making, we propose a framework for training a generalizable Fairness Reward Model (FRM). Our model assigns a fairness score to LLM reasoning, enabling the system to down-weight biased trajectories and favor equitable ones when aggregating decisions across reasoning chains. We show that a single Fairness Reward Model, trained on weakly supervised, LLM-annotated examples of biased versus unbiased reasoning, transfers across tasks, domains, and model families without additional fine-tuning. When applied to real-world decision-making tasks including recidivism prediction and social media moderation, our approach consistently improves fairness while matching, or even surpassing, baseline accuracy.



b238324b309da12c7446d92c14db9f7e-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multimodal hallucination in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) restricts the correctness of MLLMs. However, multimodal hallucinations are multi-sourced and arise from diverse causes. Existing benchmarks fail to adequately distinguish between perception-induced hallucinations and reasoning-induced hallucinations. This failure constitutes a significant issue and hinders the diagnosis of multimodal reasoning failures within MLLMs. To address this, we propose the MIRAGE benchmark, which isolates reasoning hallucinations by constructing questions where input images are correctly perceived by MLLMs yet reasoning errors persist. MIRAGE introduces multi-granular evaluation metrics: accuracy, factuality, and LLMs hallucination score for hallucination quantification. Our analysis reveals that (1) the model scale, data scale, and training stages significantly affect the degree of logical, fabrication, and factual hallucinations; (2) current MLLMs show no effective improvement on spatial hallucinations caused by misinterpreted spatial relationships, indicating their limited visual reasoning capabilities; and (3) question types correlate with distinct hallucination patterns, highlighting targeted challenges and potential mitigation strategies. To address these challenges, we propose Logos, a method that combines curriculum reinforcement fine-tuning to encourage models to generate logic-consistent reasoning chains by stepwise reducing learning difficulty, and collaborative hint inference to reduce reasoning complexity. Logos establishes a baseline on MIRAGE, and reduces the logical hallucinations in original base models.



More Thinking Less Seeing Assessing Amplified Hallucination in Reasoning Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

Test-time compute has empowered multimodal large language models to generate extended reasoning chains, yielding strong performance on tasks such as multimodal math reasoning. However, we observe that this improved reasoning ability often comes with increased hallucination: as generations become longer, models tend to drift away from image-grounded content and rely more on language priors. Attention analysis reveals that longer reasoning chains reduce focus on visual inputs, contributing to hallucination. To systematically study this phenomenon, we introduce RH-AUC, a metric that quantifies how a model's perception accuracy changes with reasoning length, enabling evaluation of whether the model preserves visual grounding while reasoning. We also release RH-Bench, a diagnostic benchmark covering diverse multimodal tasks, designed to jointly assess the balance of reasoning ability and hallucination. We find that (i) larger models generally exhibit a better balance between reasoning and perception; (ii) reasoning and perception balance depends more on the types and domains of the training data than its volume. Our findings highlight the need for evaluation frameworks that account for both reasoning quality and perceptual reliability.


61960fdfda4d4e95fa1c1f6e64bfe8bc-Paper-Conference.pdf

Neural Information Processing Systems

This approach transforms conventional textto-image generation and editing into a reasoning-guided framework that analyzes semantic relationships and spatial arrangements. We define the formulation of GoT and construct large-scale GoT datasets containing over 9M samples with detailed reasoning chains capturing semantic-spatial relationships. To leverage the advantages of GoT, we implement a unified framework that integrates Qwen2.5VL for reasoning chain generation with an end-to-end diffusion model enhanced by our novel Semantic-Spatial Guidance Module. Experiments show our GoT framework achieves excellent performance on both generation and editing tasks, with significant improvements over baselines. Additionally, our approach enables interactive visual generation, allowing users to explicitly modify reasoning steps for precise image adjustments. GoT pioneers a new direction for reasoning-driven visual generation and editing, producing images that better align with human intent. We will release our datasets and models to facilitate future research.


Think Silently, Think Fast: Dynamic Latent Compression of LLMReasoning Chains

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve superior performance through Chainof-Thought (CoT) reasoning, but these token-level reasoning chains are computationally expensive and inefficient. In this paper, we introduce Compressed Latent Reasoning (CoLaR), a novel framework that dynamically compresses reasoning processes in latent space through a two-stage training approach. First, during supervised fine-tuning, CoLaR extends beyond next-token prediction by incorporating an auxiliary next compressed embedding prediction objective. This process merges embeddings of consecutive tokens using a compression factor crandomly sampled from a predefined range, and trains a specialized latent head to predict distributions of subsequent compressed embeddings. Second, we enhance CoLaR through reinforcement learning (RL) that leverages the latent head's non-deterministic nature to explore diverse reasoning paths and exploit more compact ones. This approach enables CoLaR to: i) perform reasoning at a dense latent level (i.e., silently), substantially reducing reasoning chain length, and ii) dynamically adjust reasoning speed at inference time by simply prompting the desired compression factor. Extensive experiments across four mathematical reasoning datasets demonstrate that CoLaR achieves 14.1% higher accuracy than latent-based baseline methods at comparable compression ratios, and reduces reasoning chain length by 53.3%with