Transformers Provably Learn to Internalize Chain-of-Thought
Provides theoretical and empirical results on when transformers trained with a curriculum learn to internalize explicit reasoning steps.
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arXiv:2605.28600 · Initial submission: 2026-05-27
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Internalized reasoning — Learn from worked solutions so that some or all of the reasoning can later happen without writing those steps. Training may use a separate teacher model or progressively remove written steps from the model being trained.
Analysis and evaluation — Measure how well these methods work, investigate what their internal computation does, and identify where they fail. This includes experiments, studies of model internals, and mathematical results.
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