@inproceedings{yang-etal-2025-internal,
    title = "Internal Chain-of-Thought: Empirical Evidence for Layer{-}wise Subtask Scheduling in {LLM}s",
    author = "Yang, Zhipeng  and
      Li, Junzhuo  and
      Xia, Siyu  and
      Hu, Xuming",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.emnlp-main.1147/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1147",
    pages = "22547--22575",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "We show that large language models (LLMs) exhibit an $\textit{internal chain-of-thought}$: they sequentially decompose and execute composite tasks layer-by-layer. Two claims ground our study: (i) distinct subtasks are learned at different network depths, and (ii) these subtasks are executed sequentially across layers. On a benchmark of 15 two-step composite tasks, we employ layer-from context-masking and propose a novel cross-task patching method, confirming (i). To examine claim (ii), we apply LogitLens to decode hidden states, revealing a consistent layerwise execution pattern. We further replicate our analysis on the real-world $\text{TRACE}$ benchmark, observing the same stepwise dynamics. Together, our results enhance LLMs transparency by showing their capacity to internally plan and execute subtasks (or instructions), opening avenues for fine-grained, instruction-level activation steering."
}