reasoning

Definition

Reaching an answer through intermediate steps — decomposition, partial results, self-checking — rather than in a single pass. It is the headline capability for math, code, and planning benchmarks, and it motivates spending extra compute at inference time on longer deliberation. Do not confuse it with "inference" in the statistical sense, which merely means running the model forward.

Explainers using this term

• Chain-of-Thought from Scratch — What Changes When You Make a Model Show Its WorkChain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
• Paper Walkthrough: Random Attention — Throwing KV Cache Entries Away at Random Works Just as WellRandom Attention: Rethinking KV Cache Eviction for Efficient Reasoning
• Paper Walkthrough: Code as Worlds — An Agent That Writes the World Down as Runnable CodeCode as Worlds: Agentic Discovery of Executable World Representations for Physical Reasoning