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arXiv 提交日期: 2026-06-02
📄 Abstract - An Asymptotic Theory of Chain-of-Thought in In-Context Learning

Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning has become a widely used mechanism for eliciting multi-step reasoning in large language models by generating intermediate reasoning steps at inference time. Yet the scaling behavior of generalization with CoT depth remains poorly understood. To address this question, we study a theoretically solvable model of CoT for in-context weight prediction in linear regression, where test-time reasoning is represented as an iterative refinement of the weight-parameter estimate. Using tools from random matrix theory under high-dimensional asymptotics, we derive an exact formula for the generalization error as a function of reasoning depth, pretraining data amount, and context length. Our analysis reveals a sharp phase transition separating exponential and polynomial improvement, saturation, and overthinking, and characterizes how the optimal reasoning depth scales. We further show that deeper reasoning is most effective with sufficiently rich pretraining and in-context information, whereas limited pretraining or context makes longer reasoning prone to error amplification or saturation. We also validate these predictions through experiments on fully learned linear attention and softmax attention models. Our results provide a unified theoretical account of how test-time CoT depth affects generalization.

顶级标签: llm theory
详细标签: chain-of-thought in-context learning generalization phase transition linear regression 或 搜索:

上下文学习中思维链的渐近理论 / An Asymptotic Theory of Chain-of-Thought in In-Context Learning


1️⃣ 一句话总结

本文通过一个可理论求解的线性回归模型,利用高维随机矩阵工具,推导出思维链推理深度影响泛化误差的精确公式,发现了推理效果从指数提升到饱和甚至下降的相变规律,并揭示了深层推理只有在预训练数据充分且上下文信息丰富时才有效的条件。

源自 arXiv: 2606.03217