Mind Your Step (by Step)

🌀 Mind Your Step (by Step): Chain-of-Thought can Reduce Performance on Tasks where Thinking Makes Humans Worse

This research paper examines how chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting—encouraging models to reason step-by-step—affects large language and multimodal model performance across tasks. While CoT generally boosts performance, the authors find it significantly hampers model accuracy in three specific contexts: implicit statistical learning, facial recognition, and classifying data with exceptions. The paper suggests a similarity between CoT and human verbal reasoning, proposing that tasks…