# Chain of Simulation: A Dual-Mode Reasoning Framework for Large Language Models with Dynamic Problem Routing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02842 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02842/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 20 of its 22 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Feb 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11366/) (2023)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10601/) (2023)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [Program of Thoughts Prompting: Disentangling Computation from Reasoning for Numerical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12588/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Are Human-Level Prompt Engineers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01910/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models as Optimizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03409/) (2023)
- [Did Aristotle Use a Laptop? A Question Answering Benchmark with Implicit Reasoning Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.02235/) (2021)
- [Plan-and-Solve Prompting: Improving Zero-Shot Chain-of-Thought Reasoning by Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04091/) (2023)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.05698/) (2015)
- [Universal Self-Consistency for Large Language Model Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17311/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Table: Evolving Tables in the Reasoning Chain for Table Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04398/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Knowledge: Grounding Large Language Models via Dynamic Knowledge Adapting over Heterogeneous Sources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13269/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [LLM Reasoning Is Latent, Not the Chain of Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15726/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present Chain of Simulation (CoS), a novel dual-mode reasoning framework that dynamically routes problems to specialized reasoning strategies in Large Language Models (LLMs). Unlike existing uniform prompting approaches, CoS employs three distinct reasoning modes: (1) computational flow with self-consistency for mathematical problems, (2) symbolic state tracking with JSON representations for spatial reasoning, and (3) hybrid fact-extraction for multi-hop inference. Through comprehensive evaluation on GSM8K, StrategyQA, and bAbI benchmarks using four state-of-the-art models (Gemma-3 27B, LLaMA-3.1 8B, Mistral 7B, and Qwen-2.5 14B), we demonstrate that CoS achieves 71.5% accuracy on GSM8K (1.0% absolute improvement), 90.0% on StrategyQA (2.5% improvement), and 19.0% on bAbI (65.2% relative improvement) compared to the strongest baselines. The analysis reveals that problem-specific mode selection is crucial, with computational mode achieving 81.2% accuracy when correctly applied to mathematical problems, while misrouting leads to 0% accuracy. We provide detailed algorithms for mode selection, state tracking, and answer extraction, establishing CoS as an effective approach for improving LLM reasoning without additional training. The framework provides superior trade-offs between accuracy and efficiency compared to Self-Consistency, achieving comparable performance at 54% lower computational cost.