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Mathematical reasoning is a challenging task for large language models (LLMs), while the scaling relationship of it with respect to LLM capacity is under-explored. In this paper, we investigate how the pre-training loss, supervised data…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Zheng Yuan , Hongyi Yuan , Chengpeng Li , Guanting Dong , Keming Lu , Chuanqi Tan , Chang Zhou , Jingren Zhou

Superalignment, where humans act as weak supervisors for superhuman models, has become a crucial problem with the rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent work has preliminarily studied this problem by using weak models to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Wenkai Yang , Shiqi Shen , Guangyao Shen , Wei Yao , Yong Liu , Zhi Gong , Yankai Lin , Ji-Rong Wen

Large Language Models (LLMs) solely trained on next-token prediction learn to solve a wide range of problems involving mathematical reasoning. But how does this ability evolve during training? We show the first analysis of how mathematical…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-15 Shubhra Mishra , Gabriel Poesia , Noah D. Goodman

The pretrained large language models (LLMs) are finetuned with labeled data for better instruction following ability and alignment with human values. In this paper, we study the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning on reasoning tasks and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Zhiwen Ruan , Yun Chen , Yutao Hou , Peng Li , Yang Liu , Guanhua Chen

Recently, Language Models (LMs) instruction-tuned on multiple tasks, also known as multitask-prompted fine-tuning (MT), have shown the capability to generalize to unseen tasks. Previous work has shown that scaling the number of training…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Joel Jang , Seungone Kim , Seonghyeon Ye , Doyoung Kim , Lajanugen Logeswaran , Moontae Lee , Kyungjae Lee , Minjoon Seo

Large language models (LLMs) can perform remarkably complex tasks, yet the fine-grained details of how these capabilities emerge during pretraining remain poorly understood. Scaling laws on validation loss tell us how much a model improves…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Emmy Liu , Kaiser Sun , Millicent Li , Isabelle Lee , Lindia Tjuatja , Jen-tse Huang , Graham Neubig

Widely used alignment techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), rely on the ability of humans to supervise model behavior - for example, to evaluate whether a model faithfully followed instructions or generated…

Large language models (LLMs) still struggle across tasks outside of high-resource languages. In this work, we investigate cross-lingual transfer to lower-resource languages where task-specific post-training data is scarce. Building on prior…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Lucas Bandarkar , Nanyun Peng

Large language models have been shown to suffer from reasoning inconsistency issues. That is, they fail more in situations unfamiliar to the training data, even though exact or very similar reasoning paths exist in more common cases that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Ben Zhou , Sarthak Jain , Yi Zhang , Qiang Ning , Shuai Wang , Yassine Benajiba , Dan Roth

Commonsense reasoning benchmarks have been largely solved by fine-tuning language models. The downside is that fine-tuning may cause models to overfit to task-specific data and thereby forget their knowledge gained during pre-training.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Kaixin Ma , Filip Ilievski , Jonathan Francis , Satoru Ozaki , Eric Nyberg , Alessandro Oltramari

Autoregressive language models, pretrained using large text corpora to do well on next word prediction, have been successful at solving many downstream tasks, even with zero-shot usage. However, there is little theoretical understanding of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-04-15 Nikunj Saunshi , Sadhika Malladi , Sanjeev Arora

Recent curriculum techniques in the post-training stage of LLMs have been empirically observed to outperform non-curriculum approaches in improving reasoning performance, yet a principled understanding of their effectiveness and limitations…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Dake Bu , Wei Huang , Andi Han , Atsushi Nitanda , Hau-San Wong , Qingfu Zhang , Taiji Suzuki

Uncovering early-stage metrics that reflect final model performance is one core principle for large-scale pretraining. The existing scaling law demonstrates the power-law correlation between pretraining loss and training flops, which serves…

Despite rapid advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), they continue to struggle with following relatively simple and unambiguous instructions, particularly when compositional structure is involved. Recent work suggests…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Prince Kumar , Rudra Murthy , Riyaz Bhat , Danish Contractor

Reinforcement learning (RL)-based post-training often improves the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) beyond the training domain, while supervised fine-tuning (SFT) frequently leads to general capabilities forgetting.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Dan Shi , Zhuowen Han , Simon Ostermann , Renren Jin , Josef van Genabith , Deyi Xiong

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on reasoning tasks, yet their logical abilities remain contested. To address this, we study LLMs' reasoning in a well-defined fragment of logic: syllogistic reasoning. We cast the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Leonardo Bertolazzi , Manuel Vargas Guzmán , Raffaella Bernardi , Maciej Malicki , Jakub Szymanik

Post-training improves large language models (LLMs) but often worsens confidence calibration, leading to systematic overconfidence. Recent unsupervised post-hoc methods for post-trained LMs (PoLMs) mitigate this by aligning PoLM confidence…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Beier Luo , Cheng Wang , Hongxin Wei , Sharon Li , Xuefeng Du

Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on extensive web-scale corpora, have demonstrated remarkable abilities across diverse tasks, especially as they are scaled up. Nevertheless, even state-of-the-art models struggle in certain cases,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-16 Irina Bigoulaeva , Harish Tayyar Madabushi , Iryna Gurevych

Despite the remarkable capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs), the mechanisms behind their problem-solving abilities remain elusive. In this work, we aim to better understand how the learning dynamics of LLM finetuning shapes…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Katie Kang , Amrith Setlur , Dibya Ghosh , Jacob Steinhardt , Claire Tomlin , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar

Many applications of large language models (LLMs) require deductive reasoning, yet models frequently produce incorrect or redundant inference steps. We frame natural language inference as a search problem where the final answer is the valid…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Andreas Opedal , Francesco Ignazio Re , Abulhair Saparov , Mrinmaya Sachan , Bernhard Schölkopf , Ryan Cotterell