Related papers: Variational Reasoning for Language Models

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as an effective approach for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). The Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) family has demonstrated strong…

When used as a surrogate objective for maximum likelihood estimation in latent variable models, the evidence lower bound (ELBO) produces state-of-the-art results. Inspired by this, we consider the extension of the ELBO to a family of lower…

The success of neural networks comes hand in hand with a desire for more interpretability. We focus on text classifiers and make them more interpretable by having them provide a justification, a rationale, for their predictions. We approach…

Reasoning has emerged as the next major frontier for language models (LMs), with rapid advances from both academic and industrial labs. However, this progress often outpaces methodological rigor, with many evaluations relying on…

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly solve difficult problems by producing "reasoning traces" before emitting a final response. However, it remains unclear how accuracy and decision commitment evolve along a reasoning trajectory, and…

Vision-Language Models in Continual Learning (VLM-CL) aim to continuously adapt to new multimodal tasks while retaining prior knowledge. The emerging paradigm that couples Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) with Reinforcement Learning…

Recently, latent reasoning has been introduced into large language models (LLMs) to leverage rich information within a continuous space. However, without stochastic sampling, these methods inevitably collapse to deterministic inference,…

We propose a statistical framework built on latent variable modeling for scaling laws of large language models (LLMs). Our work is motivated by the rapid emergence of numerous new LLM families with distinct architectures and training…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, but still struggle with complex reasoning tasks requiring multiple steps. While prompt-based methods like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can improve LLM reasoning at inference time,…

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have achieved remarkable progress on complex tasks by generating extended chains of thought (CoT). However, their uncontrolled output lengths pose significant challenges for real-world deployment, where…

Recent progress in deep latent variable models has largely been driven by the development of flexible and scalable variational inference methods. Variational training of this type involves maximizing a lower bound on the log-likelihood,…

Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has been the dominant approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recently, Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has simplified this…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) excel on complex problems but face a critical barrier to efficiency: reinforcement learning (RL) training requires long rollouts for outcome-based rewards, where autoregressive decoding dominates time and…

Structured reasoning can improve the inference performance of large language models (LLMs), but it also introduces computational cost and control constraints. When additional reasoning structure helps, and when it instead reduces efficiency…

Looped Language Models (LoopLMs) perform multi-step latent reasoning prior to token generation and outperform conventional LLMs on reasoning benchmarks at smaller parameter budgets. However, attempts to further improve LoopLM reasoning with…

Large multimodal reasoning models have achieved rapid progress, but their advancement is constrained by two major limitations: the absence of open, large-scale, high-quality long chain-of-thought (CoT) data, and the instability of…

We show that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can elicit strong mathematical reasoning in certain language models even with spurious rewards that have little, no, or even negative correlation with the correct answer.…

Amortised inference enables scalable learning of sequential latent-variable models (LVMs) with the evidence lower bound (ELBO). In this setting, variational posteriors are often only partially conditioned. While the true posteriors depend,…

Recent advancements in the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) show that employing group relative policy optimization (GRPO) algorithm for reinforcement learning (RL) training allows the models to use more…