Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (CoT) is a prompting and inference technique in which large language models generate explicit intermediate reasoning steps before producing a final answer, improving performance on complex tasks such as mathematical problem solving, logical inference, and multi-step question answering. Research in this area addresses how to elicit, structure, and evaluate reasoning chains, as well as how to mitigate failure modes such as overthinking, redundant steps, and reasoning that diverges from correct conclusions despite fluent presentation.
NEC Laboratories America heads to ACL 2026 in San Diego, California, July 2–7, to present accepted papers spanning knowledge updating and memory control in large language models, task-aware cultural alignment, uncertainty-aware reasoning, and adaptive chain-of-thought optimization, representing some of the most active frontiers in NLP and AI research today.
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NEC Laboratories America, Inc. (NEC Labs) is the US-based center for NEC Corporation’s global network of corporate research laboratories. Our diverse research groups collaborate with industry, academia and governments to provide disruptive solutions to complex problems. A leader in the integration of IT and network technologies with more than 100 years of expertise, NEC provides a combination of products and solutions that cross-utilize the company’s experience and global resources to meet the complex and ever-changing needs of its customers.