English
Related papers

Related papers: Style over Substance: Distilled Language Models Re…

200 papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) are important tools for reasoning and problem-solving, while they often operate passively, answering questions without actively discovering new ones. This limitation reduces their ability to simulate human-like…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Hong Su

Reasoning LLMs often spend substantial tokens on long intermediate reasoning traces (e.g., chain-of-thought) when solving new problems. We propose to summarize and store reusable reasoning skills distilled from extensive deliberation and…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Guangxiang Zhao , Qilong Shi , Xusen Xiao , Xiangzheng Zhang , Tong Yang , Lin Sun

Recent reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable problem-solving abilities but often generate long thinking traces whose utility is unclear. Our work aims to improve their efficiency, enabling them to reach high…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Xiang Liu , Xuming Hu , Xiaowen Chu , Eunsol Choi

Knowledge distillation from large language models (LLMs) assumes that the teacher's output distribution is a high-quality training signal. On reasoning tasks, this assumption is frequently violated. A model's intermediate representations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Ryan Brown , Chris Russell

Large language models (LLMs) have shown incredible performance in completing various real-world tasks. The current paradigm of knowledge learning for LLMs is mainly based on learning from examples, in which LLMs learn the internal rule…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Wenkai Yang , Yankai Lin , Jie Zhou , Ji-Rong Wen

Large language models have shown remarkable reasoning abilities and scaling laws suggest that large parameter count, especially along the depth axis, is the primary driver. In this work, we make a stronger claim -- many reasoning problems…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Nikunj Saunshi , Nishanth Dikkala , Zhiyuan Li , Sanjiv Kumar , Sashank J. Reddi

The shift toward interacting with frozen, "black-box" Large Language Models (LLMs) has transformed prompt engineering from a heuristic exercise into a critical optimization challenge. We propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Krishna Sayana , Ketan Todi , Ambarish Jash

Reasoning has become a central capability in large language models. Recent research has shown that reasoning performance can be improved by looping an LLM's layers in the latent dimension, resulting in looped reasoning language models.…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known to acquire reasoning capabilities through shared inference patterns in pre-training data, which are further elicited via Chain-of-Thought (CoT) practices. However, whether fundamental reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Xingwei Tan , Marco Valentino , Mahmud Elahi Akhter , Yuxiang Zhou , Maria Liakata , Nikolaos Aletras

The reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) have improved with chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, allowing models to solve complex tasks stepwise. However, training CoT capabilities requires detailed reasoning data, which is…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Fu-Chieh Chang , Yu-Ting Lee , Hui-Ying Shih , Yi Hsuan Tseng , Pei-Yuan Wu

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Lucas Dionisopoulos , Nicklas Majamaki , Prithviraj Ammanabrolu

We propose RecaLLM, a set of reasoning language models post-trained to make effective use of long-context information. In-context retrieval, which identifies relevant evidence from context, and reasoning are deeply intertwined: retrieval…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Kyle Whitecross , Negin Rahimi

A key paradigm to improve the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is to allocate more inference-time compute to search against a verifier or reward model. This process can then be utilized to refine the pretrained model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Juno Kim , Denny Wu , Jason Lee , Taiji Suzuki

Large language models (LMs) beyond a certain scale, demonstrate the emergent capability of generating free-text rationales for their predictions via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. While CoT can yield dramatically improved performance,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-01 Peifeng Wang , Zhengyang Wang , Zheng Li , Yifan Gao , Bing Yin , Xiang Ren

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning and generalization at the expense of degrading memorized knowledge. We challenge this narrative by observing that RL-enhanced models consistently…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Renfei Zhang , Manasa Kaniselvan , Niloofar Mireshghallah

Reasoning in Large Language Models incurs significant inference-time compute, yet the token-level information structure of reasoning traces remains underexplored. We observe that reasoning tokens split into two functional types: low-entropy…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Zhenyu Zhao , Sander Land , Daniel M. Bikel , Waseem Alshikh

Backtracking, an emergent behavior elicited by reasoning fine-tuning, has been shown to be a key mechanism in reasoning models' enhanced capabilities. Prior work has succeeded in manipulating this behavior via steering vectors, but the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-18 Jake Ward , Chuqiao Lin , Constantin Venhoff , Neel Nanda

Recent advances in reasoning-enhanced Large Language Models such as OpenAI-o1/3 and DeepSeek-R1 have significantly improved performance on complex tasks. However, the quality and transparency of their internal reasoning processes remain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Juncheng Wu , Sheng Liu , Haoqin Tu , Hang Yu , Xiaoke Huang , James Zou , Cihang Xie , Yuyin Zhou

Knowledge distillation typically involves transferring knowledge from a Large Language Model (LLM) to a Smaller Language Model (SLM). However, in tasks such as text matching, fine-tuned smaller models often yield more effective…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-09 Mingzhe Li , Jing Xiang , Qishen Zhang , Kaiyang Wan , Xiuying Chen

Reasoning is a core capability of large language models, yet how multi-step reasoning is learned and executed remains unclear. We study this question in a controlled cellular-automata (1dCA) framework that excludes memorisation by using…