Related papers: How Does RL Post-training Induce Skill Composition…

Scaled post-training now drives many of the largest capability gains in language models (LMs), yet its effect on pretrained knowledge remains poorly understood. Not all forgetting is equal: Forgetting one fact (e.g., a U.S. president or an…

In this study, we address the challenge of learning generalizable policies for compositional tasks defined by logical specifications. These tasks consist of multiple temporally extended sub-tasks. Due to the sub-task inter-dependencies and…

The emergence of compositional reasoning in large language models through reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a key driver of recent empirical successes. Despite this progress, it remains unclear which…

Compositional generalization is the ability to generalize systematically to a new data distribution by combining known components. Although humans seem to have a great ability to generalize compositionally, state-of-the-art neural models…

Humans commonly solve complex problems by decomposing them into easier subproblems and then combining the subproblem solutions. This type of compositional reasoning permits reuse of the subproblem solutions when tackling future tasks that…

Neural networks are very powerful learning systems, but they do not readily generalize from one task to the other. This is partly due to the fact that they do not learn in a compositional way, that is, by discovering skills that are shared…

Math reasoning has become the poster child of progress in large language models (LLMs), with new models rapidly surpassing human-level performance on benchmarks like MATH and AIME. But as math leaderboards improve week by week, it is worth…

Learning to use tools to solve a variety of tasks is an innate ability of humans and has been observed of animals in the wild. However, the underlying mechanisms that are required to learn to use tools are abstract and widely contested in…

Long chain-of-thought (CoT) significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, extensive reasoning traces lead to inefficiencies and increased time-to-first-token (TTFT). We propose a training…

Language Models (LMs) exhibit two distinct mechanisms for knowledge acquisition: in-weights learning (i.e., encoding information within the model weights) and in-context learning (ICL). Although these two modes offer complementary…

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a key post-pretraining step for aligning large language models (LLMs) with complex tasks and human preferences. While it is often assumed that RL fine-tuning requires updating most of a model's parameters, we…

Instruction tuning is commonly assumed to endow language models with a domain-general ability to follow instructions, yet the underlying mechanism remains poorly understood. Does instruction-following rely on a universal mechanism or…

We show that iterative deployment of large language models (LLMs), each fine-tuned on data carefully curated by users from the previous models' deployment, can significantly change the properties of the resultant models. By testing this…

Humans excel at applying learned behavior to unlearned situations. A crucial component of this generalization behavior is our ability to compose/decompose a whole into reusable parts, an attribute known as compositionality. One of the…

The effectiveness of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in Large Language Models (LLMs) depends on the nature and diversity of the data used before and during RL. In particular, reasoning problems can often be approached in multiple ways that rely…

The compositional generalization abilities of neural models have been sought after for human-like linguistic competence. The popular method to evaluate such abilities is to assess the models' input-output behavior. However, that does not…

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…

Generalization to novel compound tasks under distribution shift is important for deploying transformer-based language models (LMs). This work investigates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning as a means to enhance OOD generalization. Through…

Current language models have demonstrated their capability to develop basic reasoning, but struggle in more complicated reasoning tasks that require a combination of atomic skills, such as math word problem requiring skills like arithmetic…

To be successful in real-world tasks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) needs to exploit the compositional, relational, and hierarchical structure of the world, and learn to transfer it to the task at hand. Recent advances in representation…