mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

CoT-Kinetics: A Theoretical Modeling Assessing LRM Reasoning Process

arXiv 2505.13408 ↗First posted 19 May 2025cs.AI cs.CLcited by 50

On the map: LLM reasoning → Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning

Abstract (arXiv)

Recent Large Reasoning Models significantly improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models by learning to reason, exhibiting the promising performance in solving complex tasks. LRMs solve tasks that require complex reasoning by explicitly generating reasoning trajectories together with answers. Nevertheless, judging the quality of such an output answer is not easy because only considering the correctness of the answer is not enough and the soundness of the reasoning trajectory part matters as well. Logically, if the soundness of the reasoning part is poor, even if the answer is correct, the confidence of the derived answer should be low. Existing methods did consider jointly assessing the overall output answer by taking into account the reasoning part, however, their capability is still not satisfactory as the causal relationship of the reasoning to the concluded answer cannot properly reflected. In this paper, inspired by classical mechanics, we present a novel approach towards establishing a CoT-Kinetics energy equation. Specifically, our CoT-Kinetics energy equation formulates the token state transformation process, which is regulated by LRM internal transformer layers, as like a particle kinetics dynamics governed in a mechanical field. Our CoT-Kinetics energy assigns a scalar score to evaluate specifically the soundness of the reasoning phase, telling how confident the derived answer could be given the evaluated reasoning. As such, the LRM's overall output quality can be accurately measured, rather than a coarse judgment (e.g., correct or incorrect) anymore.

Key facts. Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 10 of its 91 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 19 May 2025.

Builds on

10 of 91 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024Chain-of-Probe: Examining the Necessity and Accuracy of CoT Step-by-Step23 Jun

Other references · 9

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
  2. 2021SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddingscited by 2,168
  3. 2024Robust Watermarking Using Generative Priors Against Image Editing: From Benchmarking to Advancescited by 105
  4. 2025ChartCoder: Advancing Multimodal Large Language Model for Chart-to-Code Generationcited by 88
  5. 2025A Survey of Safety on Large Vision-Language Models: Attacks, Defenses and Evaluationscited by 66
  6. 2024LLaVA Steering: Visual Instruction Tuning with 500x Fewer Parameters through Modality Linear Representation-Steeringcited by 50
  7. 2025Keeping Yourself is Important in Downstream Tuning Multimodal Large Language Modelcited by 15
  8. 2024PERFT: Parameter-Efficient Routed Fine-Tuning for Mixture-of-Expert Modelcited by 9
  9. 2025ThoughtProbe: Classifier-Guided Thought Space Exploration Leveraging LLM Intrinsic Reasoningcited by 4

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2025: 22; 2026: 28.

50 papers.

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  1. 2025OFFSET: Segmentation-based Focus Shift Revision for Composed Image Retrievalcited by 40
  2. 2026ReTrack: Evidence-Driven Dual-Stream Directional Anchor Calibration Network for Composed Video Retrievalcited by 39
  3. 2025ASCD: Attention-Steerable Contrastive Decoding for Reducing Hallucination in MLLMcited by 36
  4. 2025HUD: Hierarchical Uncertainty-Aware Disambiguation Network for Composed Video Retrievalcited by 32
  5. 2026INTENT: Invariance and Discrimination-aware Noise Mitigation for Robust Composed Image Retrievalcited by 26
  6. 2026HABIT: Chrono-Synergia Robust Progressive Learning Framework for Composed Image Retrievalcited by 24
  7. 2025Verifying Chain-of-Thought Reasoning via Its Computational Graphcited by 20
  8. 2026Air-Know: Arbiter-Calibrated Knowledge-Internalizing Robust Network for Composed Image Retrievalcited by 17
  9. 2026ConeSep: Cone-based Robust Noise-Unlearning Compositional Network for Composed Image Retrievalcited by 15
  10. 2026Graph is a Substrate Across Data Modalitiescited by 13
  11. 2026TEMA: Anchor the Image, Follow the Text for Multi-Modification Composed Image Retrievalcited by 13
  12. 2026MetaSkill-Evolve: Recursive Self-Improvement of LLM Agents via Two-Timescale Meta-Skill Evolutioncited by 12
38 more
  1. 2025UORA: Uniform Orthogonal Reinitialization Adaptation in Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning of Large Modelscited by 11
  2. 2025Can Visual Input Be Compressed? A Visual Token Compression Benchmark for Large Multimodal Modelscited by 11
  3. 2025ARIA: Training Language Agents with Intention-Driven Reward Aggregationcited by 9
  4. 2025Pretraining on the Test Set Is No Longer All You Need: A Debate-Driven Approach to QA Benchmarkscited by 7
  5. 2025MINED: Probing and Updating with Multimodal Time-Sensitive Knowledge for Large Multimodal Modelscited by 7
  6. 2026OPD-V: Visual On-Policy Self-Distillation with Modality Balancecited by 7
  7. 2025TraPO: A Semi-Supervised Reinforcement Learning Framework for Boosting LLM Reasoningcited by 6
  8. 2026What if Agents Could Imagine? Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary HOI Comprehension through Generationcited by 6
  9. 2025PreP-OCR: A Complete Pipeline for Document Image Restoration and Enhanced OCR Accuracycited by 4
  10. 2025MV-Debate: Multi-view Agent Debate with Dynamic Reflection Gating for Multimodal Harmful Content Detection in Social Mediacited by 4
  11. 2026Beyond Scalars: Evaluating and Understanding LLM Reasoning via Geometric Progress and Stabilitycited by 4
  12. 2025AStF: Motion Style Transfer via Adaptive Statistics Fusorcited by 3
  13. 2025SatireDecoder: Visual Cascaded Decoupling for Enhancing Satirical Image Comprehensioncited by 3
  14. 2026CodeCircuit: Toward Inferring LLM-Generated Code Correctness via Attribution Graphscited by 3
  15. 2026Set-Valued Prediction for Large Language Models with Feasibility-Aware Coverage Guaranteescited by 3
  16. 2026EchoRL: Reinforcement Learning via Rollout Echoingcited by 3
  17. 2025Diffusion-Based Image Editing: An Unforeseen Adversary to Robust Invisible Watermarkscited by 2
  18. 2025Eliciting Chain-of-Thought in Base LLMs via Gradient-Based Representation Optimizationcited by 2
  19. 2026CoT2-Meta: Budgeted Metacognitive Control for Test-Time Reasoningcited by 2
  20. 2026ReflectRL: Learning from Golden Negative Trajectories via Reflective-to-Direct Reasoningcited by 2
  21. 2025TRACE: Trajectory-Constrained Concept Erasure in Diffusion Modelscited by 1
  22. 2025FedABC: Attention-Based Client Selection for Federated Learning with Long-Term Viewcited by 1
  23. 2025Conformal Sets in Multiple-Choice Question Answering under Black-Box Settings with Provable Coverage Guaranteescited by 1
  24. 2026Conformal Certification of Reasoning Trace Prefixescited by 1
  25. 2026Smart Picks in the Dark: Towards Efficient RLVR for Reasoning via Tracing Metacognitive Pivotscited by 1
  26. 2026IMAGINE: Adaptive Schema-Imagery Enhanced Composition for Composed Video Retrievalcited by 1
  27. 2026Uncertainty-Aware Abstention in Large Language Models with Provable Alignment Guaranteescited by 1
  28. 2025Mitigating Posterior Salience Attenuation in Long-Context LLMs with Positional Contrastive Decodingcited by 0
  29. 2025Conformal P-Value in Multiple-Choice Question Answering Tasks with Provable Risk Controlcited by 0
  30. 2025Robust Concept Erasure in Diffusion Models: A Theoretical Perspective on Security and Robustnesscited by 0
  31. 2026When Denoising Becomes Unsigning: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Watermark Fragility Under Diffusion-Based Image Editingcited by 0
  32. 2026Editing Away the Evidence: Diffusion-Based Image Manipulation and the Failure Modes of Robust Watermarkingcited by 0
  33. 2026Spatiotemporal Hidden-State Dynamics as a Signature of Internal Reasoning in Large Language Modelscited by 0
  34. 2026IndusAgent: Reinforcing Open-Vocabulary Industrial Anomaly Detection with Agentic Toolscited by 0
  35. 2026Asymptotic Risk Calibration for Selective Question Answeringcited by 0
  36. 2026FabriMAE I Trust Myself? Self-Evaluating VLA Action Generation with Markov Attention Entropycited by 0
  37. 2026DE-Venus: A Data-Efficient RLVR Framework for Large Language Modelscited by 0
  38. 2026GLIDE: Generalized Layer-wise Intrinsic Distributional Evaluation for Heterogeneous LLM Agentscited by 0

Similar, not cited

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  1. 2026MI-Distillation: Selecting from Model-Interpolated Instruct-Reasoning Data Spectrum for Chain-of-Thought Distillation
  2. 2025Early Stopping Chain-of-thoughts in Large Language Models
  3. 2024LLMs Faithfully and Iteratively Compute Answers During CoT: A Systematic Analysis With Multi-step Arithmetics
  4. 2024Geometric Analysis of Reasoning Trajectories: A Phase Space Approach to Understanding Valid and Invalid Multi-Hop Reasoning in LLMs
  5. 2025A Statistical Physics of Language Model Reasoning
  6. 2026CoTJudger: A Graph-Driven Framework for Automatic Evaluation of Chain-of-Thought Efficiency and Redundancy in LRMs
  7. 2025The Kinetics of Reasoning: How Chain-of-Thought Shapes Learning in Transformers?
  8. 2025Think Consistently, Reason Efficiently: Energy-Based Calibration for Implicit Chain-of-Thought