Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lens
Authors: name: Chengshuai Zhao; name: Zhen Tan; name: Pingchuan Ma; name: Dawei Li; name: Bohan Jiang; name: Yancheng Wang; name: Yingzhen Yang; name: Huan Liu
Published: 2025-08-02 04:37:28

Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has been shown to improve Large Language
Model (LLM) performance on various tasks. With this approach, LLMs appear to
produce human-like reasoning steps before providing answers (a.k.a., CoT
reasoning), which often leads to the perception that they engage in deliberate
inferential processes. However, some initial findings suggest that CoT
reasoning may be more superficial than it appears, motivating us to explore
further. In this paper, we study CoT reasoning via a data distribution lens and
investigate if CoT reasoning reflects a structured inductive bias learned from
in-distribution data, allowing the model to conditionally generate reasoning
paths that approximate those seen during training. Thus, its effectiveness is
fundamentally bounded by the degree of distribution discrepancy between the
training data and the test queries. With this lens, we dissect CoT reasoning
via three dimensions: task, length, and format. To investigate each dimension,
we design DataAlchemy, an isolated and controlled environment to train LLMs
from scratch and systematically probe them under various distribution
conditions. Our results reveal that CoT reasoning is a brittle mirage that
vanishes when it is pushed beyond training distributions. This work offers a
deeper understanding of why and when CoT reasoning fails, emphasizing the
ongoing challenge of achieving genuine and generalizable reasoning.