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Recent studies have shown that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) enhances overall accuracy (pass@1) but often fails to improve capability (pass@k) of LLMs in reasoning tasks, while distillation can improve both. In this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Minwu Kim , Anubhav Shrestha , Safal Shrestha , Aadim Nepal , Keith Ross

R1-style Reinforcement Learning (RL) significantly enhances Large Language Models' reasoning capabilities, yet the mechanism behind rule-based RL remains unclear. We found that small-scale SFT has substantial influence on RL but shows poor…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Yutong Chen , Jiandong Gao , Ji Wu

Despite recent progress in large-scale reinforcement learning (RL) for reasoning, the training recipe for building high-performing reasoning models remains elusive. Key implementation details of frontier models, such as DeepSeek-R1,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Yang Chen , Zhuolin Yang , Zihan Liu , Chankyu Lee , Peng Xu , Mohammad Shoeybi , Bryan Catanzaro , Wei Ping

Large language models (LLMs) excel in complex reasoning tasks, and distilling their reasoning capabilities into smaller models has shown promise. However, we uncover an interesting phenomenon, which we term the Small Model Learnability Gap:…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Yuetai Li , Xiang Yue , Zhangchen Xu , Fengqing Jiang , Luyao Niu , Bill Yuchen Lin , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Radha Poovendran

In this paper, we investigate how model distillation impacts the development of reasoning features in large language models (LLMs). To explore this, we train a crosscoder on Qwen-series models and their fine-tuned variants. Our results…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-26 David D. Baek , Max Tegmark

Specialized reasoning language models (RLMs) have demonstrated that scaling test-time computation through detailed reasoning traces significantly enhances performance. Although these traces effectively facilitate knowledge distillation into…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Philip Lippmann , Jie Yang

Recent analyses question whether reinforcement learning (RL) is responsible for strong reasoning in large language models (LLMs). At the same time, distillation and inference-time sampling, including power sampling, have emerged as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-07 Akiyoshi Tomihari , Issei Sato

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, their enormous parameter size and extremely high requirements for compute power pose challenges for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-03-26 Bohao Yang , Chen Tang , Kun Zhao , Chenghao Xiao , Chenghua Lin

The prevailing approach to distilling reasoning from Large Language Models (LLMs)-behavioral cloning from textual rationales-is fundamentally limited. It teaches Small Language Models (SLMs) to mimic surface-level patterns rather than the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Xiangyu Wen , Junhua Huang , Zeju Li , Min Li , Jianyuan Zhong , Zhijian Xu , Mingxuan Yuan , Yongxiang Huang , Qiang Xu

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Zhaoyang Zhang , Shuli Jiang , Yantao Shen , Yuting Zhang , Dhananjay Ram , Shuo Yang , Zhuowen Tu , Wei Xia , Stefano Soatto

While reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) has shown promise in mathematical reasoning, strategic reasoning for LLMs using RL remains largely unexplored. We investigate whether LLMs can develop strategic reasoning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Dongyoon Hwang , Hojoon Lee , Jaegul Choo , Dongmin Park , Jongho Park

Reasoning distillation aims to transfer multi-step reasoning capabilities from large language models to smaller, more efficient ones. While recent methods have shown promising gains, they typically rely on static teacher-student hierarchies…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khouloud Saadi , Di Wang

Recent studies have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) have strong mathematical reasoning abilities but rely on hundreds of billions of parameters. To tackle the challenge of poor reasoning in Small Language Models (SLMs),…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Xinhe Li , Jiajun Liu , Peng Wang

Recent methods have demonstrated that Large Language Models (LLMs) can solve reasoning tasks better when they are encouraged to solve subtasks of the main task first. In this paper we devise a similar strategy that breaks down reasoning…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-20 Zhuofeng Wu , He Bai , Aonan Zhang , Jiatao Gu , VG Vinod Vydiswaran , Navdeep Jaitly , Yizhe Zhang

Large reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 and their distilled variants achieve strong performance on complex reasoning tasks. Yet, distilling these models often demands large-scale data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), motivating the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-16 Lechen Zhang , Yunxiang Zhang , Wei Hu , Lu Wang

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving. Recent methods have improved reasoning through expanded corpus and multistage training…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has been shown to substantially improve the reasoning capability of small and large language models (LLMs), but existing approaches typically rely on verifiable rewards, hence ground truth labels. We propose an…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-06 Yiyang Shen , Lifu Tu , Weiran Wang

Post-training with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has substantially improved reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) via test-time scaling. However, extending this paradigm to Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) through verbose rationales yields limited…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Bangzheng Li , Jianmo Ni , Chen Qu , Ian Miao , Liu Yang , Xingyu Fu , Muhao Chen , Derek Zhiyuan Cheng

Recent advancements have demonstrated that the performance of large language models (LLMs) can be significantly enhanced by scaling computational resources at test time. A common strategy involves generating multiple Chain-of-Thought (CoT)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-28 Daniele Paliotta , Junxiong Wang , Matteo Pagliardini , Kevin Y. Li , Aviv Bick , J. Zico Kolter , Albert Gu , François Fleuret , Tri Dao

Improving performance on complex tasks and enabling interpretable decision making in large language models (LLMs), especially for clinical applications, requires effective reasoning. Yet this remains challenging without supervised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Che Liu , Haozhe Wang , Jiazhen Pan , Zhongwei Wan , Yong Dai , Fangzhen Lin , Wenjia Bai , Daniel Rueckert , Rossella Arcucci
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