Related papers: Rethinking Generalization in Reasoning SFT: A Cond…
Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) often suffer from overthinking, generating verbose reasoning traces that compromise both computational efficiency and interpretability. Unlike prior efforts that rely on global length-based rewards, we propose…
Test-time scaling has enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to tackle complex reasoning, yet the limitations of current Chain-of-Thought (CoT) evaluation obscures whether performance gains stem from genuine reasoning or mere verbosity. To…
We are interested in understanding how well Transformer language models (TLMs) can perform reasoning tasks when trained on knowledge encoded in the form of natural language. We investigate their systematic generalization abilities on a…
Memorization in Large Language Models (LLMs) poses privacy and security risks, as models may unintentionally reproduce sensitive or copyrighted data. Existing analyses focus on average-case scenarios, often neglecting the highly skewed…
Recent reinforcement learning (RL) methods have substantially enhanced the planning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the theoretical basis for their effectiveness remains elusive. In this work, we investigate RL's benefits…
Debates about large language model post-training often treat supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as imitation and reinforcement learning (RL) as discovery. But this distinction is too coarse. What matters is whether a training procedure increases…
Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) is a fundamental post-training strategy to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human intent. However, traditional SFT often ignores the one-to-many nature of language by forcing alignment with a single…
Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is an effective method for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) on downstream tasks. However, variability in training data can hinder a model's ability to generalize across domains. This paper studies the…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, reinforcement learning for LLMs faces substantial data scarcity challenges,…
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…
Continual Pre-Training (CPT) is widely used for acquiring and updating factual knowledge in LLMs. This practice treats loss as a proxy for knowledge learning, while offering no grounding into how it changes during training. We study CPT as…
Reasoning is a fundamental capability of AI agents. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities to perform reasoning tasks. However, numerous evaluations of the reasoning capabilities of LLMs have also showed some…
The prevailing paradigm for training large reasoning models--combining Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR)--is fundamentally constrained by its reliance on high-quality, human-annotated…
While large reasoning models have shown remarkable ability to generate long chains-of-thought (CoTs) in English, we still lack understanding of how these long-form reasoning abilities transfer to the vast majority of the world's languages.…
Large language models (LLMs) struggle with cross-lingual knowledge transfer: they hallucinate when asked in one language about facts expressed in a different language during training. This work introduces a controlled setting to study the…
Neural networks often learn simple explanations that fit the majority of the data while memorizing exceptions that deviate from these explanations.This behavior leads to poor generalization when the learned explanations rely on spurious…
Compositional generalization refers to correctly interpret novel combinations of known primitives, which remains a major challenge. Existing approaches often rely on supervised fine-tuning, which encourages models to imitate target outputs.…
Reasoning post-training improves Large Language Models (LLMs) on complex tasks such as mathematics and coding, but its benefits across diverse multimodal tasks remains uncertain. The trend of releasing parallel "Instruct" and "Thinking"…
Machine learning models are prone to overfitting their training (source) domains, which is commonly believed to be the reason why they falter in novel target domains. Here we examine the contrasting view that multi-source domain…
Despite the success of large language models (LLMs) in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, the stored knowledge in these models may inevitably be incomplete, out-of-date, or incorrect. This motivates the need to utilize…