Pause and Reflect: Conformal Aggregation for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning with self-consistency improves performance by aggregating multiple sampled reasoning paths. In this setting, correctness is no longer tied to a single reasoning trace but to the aggregation rule over a pool of candidate paths, making aggregation uncertainty the central challenge. This issue is critical where confidently incorrect answers are far more costly than abstentions. We introduce a conformal procedure for CoT reasoning that directly addresses aggregation uncertainty. Our approach replaces majority voting with weighted score aggregation over reasoning paths and calibrates an abstention rule using conformal risk control. This approach leads to finite...
| Authors | Yu Gu, Zijun Yu, Vahid Partovi Nia et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | stat.ML |
| Published | 13 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 13 May 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.