Mean-Field Dynamics of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models
arXiv:2608.05152v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with chain-of-thought reasoning have been widely applied in recent years, and theoretical explanations of their behavior may help deepen our understanding and guide model optimization. In this study, we introduce a framework that seeks statistical regularities and theoretical interpretations in LLM reasoning without simplifying the model architecture or making analogies to existing physical systems. We formulate LLM reasoning as a guided discovery process on a clue graph, and derive a one-dimensional ordinary differential equation for the fraction of discovered clues using the mean-field approximation. Experimentally, clue tokens are identified using the normalized surprisal of a student LLM on the outputs of a teacher LLM, and statistical regularities are obtained by averaging over many reasoning chains of thought. Our experiments show that the resulting statistical regularities are reproducible within the same dataset and can be fitted by the solving the proposed theoretical equation.
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[Submitted on 20 May 2026]
Title:Mean-Field Dynamics of Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models
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Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) with chain-of-thought reasoning have been widely applied in recent years, and theoretical explanations of their behavior may help deepen our understanding and guide model optimization. In this study, we introduce a framework that seeks statistical regularities and theoretical interpretations in LLM reasoning without simplifying the model architecture or making analogies to existing physical systems. We formulate LLM reasoning as a guided discovery process on a clue graph, and derive a one-dimensional ordinary differential equation for the fraction of discovered clues using the mean-field approximation. Experimentally, clue tokens are identified using the normalized surprisal of a student LLM on the outputs of a teacher LLM, and statistical regularities are obtained by averaging over many reasoning chains of thought. Our experiments show that the resulting statistical regularities are reproducible within the same dataset and can be fitted by the solving the proposed theoretical equation.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2608.05152 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2608.05152v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.05152
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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From: Hao Ai [view email] [v1] Wed, 20 May 2026 17:38:50 UTC (2,452 KB)
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