Understanding Chain-of-Thought in Large Language Models via Topological Data Analysis

📝 Original Info

• Title: Understanding Chain-of-Thought in Large Language Models via Topological Data Analysis
• ArXiv ID: 2512.19135
• Date: 2025-12-22
• Authors: ** 논문에 명시된 저자 정보가 제공되지 않았습니다. (저자명, 소속, 기여도 등은 원문을 확인해 주세요.) **

📝 Abstract

With the development of large language models (LLMs), particularly with the introduction of the long reasoning chain technique, the reasoning ability of LLMs in complex problem-solving has been significantly enhanced. While acknowledging the power of long reasoning chains, we cannot help but wonder: Why do different reasoning chains perform differently in reasoning? What components of the reasoning chains play a key role? Existing studies mainly focus on evaluating reasoning chains from a functional perspective, with little attention paid to their structural mechanisms. To address this gap, this work is the first to analyze and evaluate the quality of the reasoning chain from a structural perspective. We apply persistent homology from Topological Data Analysis (TDA) to map reasoning steps into semantic space, extract topological features, and analyze structural changes. These changes reveal semantic coherence, logical redundancy, and identify logical breaks and gaps. By calculating homology groups, we assess connectivity and redundancy at various scales, using barcode and persistence diagrams to quantify stability and consistency. Our results show that the topological structural complexity of reasoning chains correlates positively with accuracy. More complex chains identify correct answers sooner, while successful reasoning exhibits simpler topologies, reducing redundancy and cycles, enhancing efficiency and interpretability. This work provides a new perspective on reasoning chain quality assessment and offers guidance for future optimization.

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