The CoT Encyclopedia: Analyzing, Predicting, and Controlling how a Reasoning Model will Think
Abstract
Long chain-of-thought (CoT) is an essential ingredient in effective usage of modern large language models, but our understanding of the reasoning strategies underlying these capabilities remains limited. While some prior works have attempted to categorize CoTs using predefined strategy types, such approaches are constrained by human intuition and fail to capture the full diversity of model behaviors. In this work, we introduce the CoT Encyclopedia, a bottom-up framework for analyzing and steering model reasoning. Our method automatically extracts diverse reasoning criteria from model-generated CoTs, embeds them into a semantic space, clusters them into representative categories, and derives contrastive rubrics to interpret reasoning behavior. Human evaluations show that this framework produces more interpretable and comprehensive analyses than existing methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that this understanding enables performance gains: we can predict which strategy a model is likely to use and guide it toward more effective alternatives. Finally, we provide practical insights, such as that training data format (e.g., free-form vs. multiple-choice) has a far greater impact on reasoning behavior than data domain, underscoring the importance of format-aware model design.
Community
Abstract: Long chain-of-thought (CoT) is an essential ingredient in effective usage of modern large language models, but our understanding of the reasoning strategies underlying these capabilities remains limited. While some prior works have attempted to categorize CoTs using predefined strategy types, such approaches are constrained by human intuition and fail to capture the full diversity of model behaviors. In this work, we introduce the CoT Encyclopedia, a bottom-up framework for analyzing and steering model reasoning. Our method automatically extracts diverse reasoning criteria from model-generated CoTs, embeds them into a semantic space, clusters them into representative categories, and derives contrastive rubrics to interpret reasoning behavior. Human evaluations show that this framework produces more interpretable and comprehensive analyses than existing methods. Moreover, we demonstrate that this understanding enables performance gains: we can predict which strategy a model is likely to use and guide it toward more effective alternatives. Finally, we provide practical insights, such as that training data format (e.g., free-form vs. multiple-choice) has a far greater impact on reasoning behavior than data domain, underscoring the importance of format-aware model design.
This is an automated message from the Librarian Bot. I found the following papers similar to this paper.
The following papers were recommended by the Semantic Scholar API
- Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models (2025)
- ShorterBetter: Guiding Reasoning Models to Find Optimal Inference Length for Efficient Reasoning (2025)
- GreenMind: A Next-Generation Vietnamese Large Language Model for Structured and Logical Reasoning (2025)
- LongPerceptualThoughts: Distilling System-2 Reasoning for System-1 Perception (2025)
- Nemotron-CrossThink: Scaling Self-Learning beyond Math Reasoning (2025)
- Style over Substance: Distilled Language Models Reason Via Stylistic Replication (2025)
- xVerify: Efficient Answer Verifier for Reasoning Model Evaluations (2025)
Please give a thumbs up to this comment if you found it helpful!
If you want recommendations for any Paper on Hugging Face checkout this Space
You can directly ask Librarian Bot for paper recommendations by tagging it in a comment:
@librarian-bot
recommend
Models citing this paper 0
No model linking this paper
Datasets citing this paper 0
No dataset linking this paper
Spaces citing this paper 0
No Space linking this paper
Collections including this paper 0
No Collection including this paper