Research ArticleOpen accessPhrase in the titleEmpowering Small Language Models With Chain of Thought and Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning for Efficient Deep ReasoningAryan Raina, Shiwani Gupta, Jagruti Jadhav et al.Small Language Models (SLMs) run faster and fit on modest hardware, yet solving multi-step logic problems has traditionally been difficult for them. This work investigates a systematic, multi-model framework that combines Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) parameter-efficient fine-tuning, and measures the contribution of each component independently. We evaluate three SLMs (TinyLlama-1.1B, Phi-3-mini-4k-instruct, and Qwen2.5-1.5B) using 1,164 training samples … …Journal of Computer Science, Vol. 22, Issue 8 · 8 Sep 2026 · 862 accessesView PDFCite