K2-Think: A Parameter-Efficient Reasoning System
Abstract
K2-Think is a reasoning system that achieves state-of-the-art performance with a 32B parameter model, matching or surpassing much larger models like GPT-OSS 120B and DeepSeek v3.1. Built on the Qwen2.5 base model, our system shows that smaller models can compete at the highest levels by combining advanced post-training and test-time computation techniques. The approach is based on six key technical pillars: Long Chain-of-thought Supervised Finetuning, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), Agentic planning prior to reasoning, Test-time Scaling, Speculative Decoding, and Inference-optimized Hardware, all using publicly available open-source datasets. K2-Think excels in mathematical reasoning, achieving state-of-the-art scores on public benchmarks for open-source models, while also performing strongly in other areas such as Code and Science. Our results confirm that a more parameter-efficient model like K2-Think 32B can compete with state-of-the-art systems through an integrated post-training recipe that includes long chain-of-thought training and strategic inference-time enhancements, making open-source reasoning systems more accessible and affordable. K2-Think is freely available at k2think.ai, offering best-in-class inference speeds of over 2,000 tokens per second per request via the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2509.07604,
title = {K2-Think: A Parameter-Efficient Reasoning System},
author = {Zhoujun Cheng and Richard Fan and Shibo Hao and Taylor W. Killian and Haonan Li and Suqi Sun and Hector Ren and Alexander Moreno and Daqian Zhang and Tianjun Zhong and Yuxin Xiong and Yuanzhe Hu and Yutao Xie and Xudong Han and Yuqi Wang and Varad Pimpalkhute and Yonghao Zhuang and Aaryamonvikram Singh and Xuezhi Liang and Anze Xie and Jianshu She and Desai Fan and Chengqian Gao and Liqun Ma and Mikhail Yurochkin and John Maggs and Xuezhe Ma and Guowei He and Zhiting Hu and Zhengzhong Liu and Eric P. Xing},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07604},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
To access the K2-Think reasoning system, please visit www.k2think.ai