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Recent advances in Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning have been hindered by a persistent challenge: exploration collapse. The semantic homogeneity of random rollouts often traps…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-12 Huilin Deng , Hongchen Luo , Yue Zhu , Long Li , Zhuoyue Chen , Xinghao Zhao , Ming Li , Jihai Zhang , Mengchang Wang , Yang Cao , Yu Kang

Modern large reasoning models (LRMs) exhibit impressive multi-step problem-solving via chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, this iterative thinking mechanism introduces a new vulnerability surface. We present the Deadlock Attack, a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-21 Mohan Zhang , Yihua Zhang , Jinghan Jia , Zhangyang Wang , Sijia Liu , Tianlong Chen

Large reasoning models (LRMs) substantially outperform their base LLM counterparts on challenging reasoning benchmarks, yet it remains poorly understood where base models go wrong during token-by-token generation and how to narrow this gap…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Changshuo Shen , Leheng Sheng , Yuxin Chen , An Zhang , Xiang Wang

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have significantly advanced performance on complex tasks, yet their tendency to overthink introduces inefficiencies. This study investigates the internal mechanisms of reinforcement learning (RL)-trained LRMs…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Rongzhi Zhu , Yi Liu , Zequn Sun , Yiwei Wang , Wei Hu

Large language models (LLMs) can achieve strong reasoning performance with sufficient computation, but they do not inherently know how much computation a task requires. We study budgeted inference-time reasoning for multiple tasks under a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-08 Muyang Zhao , Qi Qi , Hao Sun

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) excel at complex reasoning tasks but often suffer from overthinking, generating overly long and redundant reasoning trajectories. To explore its essence, our empirical analysis reveals that LRMs are…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Yongjiang Liu , Haoxi Li , Xiaosong Ma , Jie Zhang , Song Guo

Mathematical reasoning tasks pose significant challenges for large language models (LLMs) because they require precise logical deduction and sequence analysis. In this work, we introduce the concept of critical tokens -- elements within…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-14 Zicheng Lin , Tian Liang , Jiahao Xu , Qiuzhi Lin , Xing Wang , Ruilin Luo , Chufan Shi , Siheng Li , Yujiu Yang , Zhaopeng Tu

In the domain of complex reasoning tasks, such as mathematical reasoning, recent advancements have proposed the use of Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) to suppress output of dispreferred responses, thereby enhancing the long-chain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Weibin Liao , Xu Chu , Yasha Wang

Large language models (LLMs) struggle with complex, long-horizon reasoning due to instability caused by their frozen policy assumption. Current test-time scaling methods treat execution feedback merely as an external signal for filtering or…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-29 Zhengbo Jiao , Hongyu Xian , Qinglong Wang , Yunpu Ma , Zhebo Wang , Zifan Zhang , Dezhang Kong , Meng Han

Recent advancements in post-training methodologies for large language models (LLMs) have highlighted reinforcement learning (RL) as a critical component for enhancing reasoning. However, the substantial computational costs associated with…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-07-29 Songjun Tu , Jiahao Lin , Xiangyu Tian , Qichao Zhang , Linjing Li , Yuqian Fu , Nan Xu , Wei He , Xiangyuan Lan , Dongmei Jiang , Dongbin Zhao

Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) has become a dominant paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs); however, the performance gains often come with a substantial increase in reasoning budget. Recent studies…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Jie Cao , Tianwei Lin , Zhenxuan Fan , Bo Yuan , Ziyuan Zhao , Rolan Yan , Wenqiao Zhang , Siliang Tang

Large Language Models (LLMs) solve many reasoning tasks via chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting, but smaller models (about 7 to 8B parameters) still struggle with multi-step reasoning under tight compute and token budgets. Existing test time…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Sagnik Chatterjee , Atharva Patil , Sricharan Ramesh

Large language models often solve complex reasoning tasks more effectively with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but at the cost of long, low-bandwidth token sequences. Humans, by contrast, often reason softly by maintaining a distribution over…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Yao Tang , Li Dong , Yaru Hao , Qingxiu Dong , Furu Wei , Jiatao Gu

Reasoning Language Models, capable of extended chain-of-thought reasoning, have demonstrated remarkable performance on tasks requiring complex logical inference. However, applying elaborate reasoning for all queries often results in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-27 Gongfan Fang , Xinyin Ma , Xinchao Wang

Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown substantially improved reasoning capabilities over traditional Large Language Models (LLMs) by incorporating extended thinking processes prior to producing final responses. However,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Lingjie Jiang , Xun Wu , Shaohan Huang , Qingxiu Dong , Zewen Chi , Li Dong , Xingxing Zhang , Tengchao Lv , Lei Cui , Furu Wei

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate strong multilingual capabilities, yet often fail to consistently generate responses in the intended language, exhibiting a phenomenon known as language confusion. Prior mitigation approaches based on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Jinho Choo , JunSeung Lee , Jimyeong Kim , Yeeho Song , S. K. Hong , Yeong-Dae Kwon

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) for chain-of-thought reasoning presents a significant challenge: supervised fine-tuning on a single "golden" rationale hurts generalization as it penalizes equally valid alternatives, whereas…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Mingye Zhu , Yi Liu , Zheren Fu , Quan Wang , Yongdong Zhang

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) significantly improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by learning to reason, exhibiting promising performance in solving complex tasks. However, their deliberative reasoning process leads…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Yue Liu , Jiaying Wu , Yufei He , Ruihan Gong , Jun Xia , Liang Li , Hongcheng Gao , Hongyu Chen , Baolong Bi , Jiaheng Zhang , Zhiqi Huang , Bryan Hooi , Stan Z. Li , Keqin Li

Large language models (LLMs) show strong reasoning abilities but often produce unnecessarily long explanations that reduce efficiency. Although reinforcement learning (RL) has been used to improve reasoning, most methods focus on accuracy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Hanbing Liu , Lang Cao , Yuanyi Ren , Mengyu Zhou , Haoyu Dong , Xiaojun Ma , Shi Han , Dongmei Zhang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in knowledge acquisition, reasoning, and tool use, making them promising candidates for autonomous agent applications. However, training LLM agents for complex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-09 Hanjiang Hu , Changliu Liu , Na Li , Yebin Wang