CoT-ICL Lab: A Synthetic Framework for Studying Chain-of-Thought Learning from In-Context Demonstrations

Abstract: We introduce CoT-ICL Lab, a framework and methodology to generate synthetic tokenized datasets and systematically study chain-of-thought (CoT) in-context learning (ICL) in LLMs. CoT-ICL Lab allows fine grained control over the complexity of in-context examples by decoupling (1) the causal structure involved in chain token generation from (2) the underlying token processing functions. We train decoder-only transformers (up to 700M parameters) on these datasets and show that CoT accelerates the accuracy transition to higher values across model sizes. In particular, we find that model depth is crucial for leveraging CoT with limited in-context examples, while more examples help shallow models match deeper model performance. Additionally, limiting the diversity of token processing functions throughout training improves causal structure learning via ICL. We also interpret these transitions by analyzing transformer embeddings and attention maps. Overall, CoT-ICL Lab serves as a simple yet powerful testbed for theoretical and empirical insights into ICL and CoT in LLMs.