arXiv Machine Learning

Learning to Reason with Curriculum I: Provable Benefits of Autocurriculum

The paper investigates whether the high costs of training chain-of-thought reasoning models can be reduced through algorithmic design. It introduces an autocurriculum approach that lets the model select which problems to focus on during training, showing that this method provably improves both supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning. For supervised fine‑tuning, autocurriculum requires exponentially fewer reasoning demonstrations by targeting prompts where the model struggles, while for reinforcement learning it decouples computational cost from the quality of the reference model, making the burn‑in cost nearly independent of target accuracy.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 29

Learning to Reason with Curriculum II: Compositional Generalization

arXiv:2606. 27721v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Compositional generalization, the ability to solve complex problems by combining solutions to simpler sub-problems, is a fundamental capability of both natural and artificial intelligence, and a key mechanism underlying chain-of-thought reasoning.

By Nived Rajaraman, Audrey Huang, Miroslav Dudik, Robert Schapire, Dylan Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy
arXiv AI
Aug 11

How Much Backtracking is Enough? Exploring the Interplay of SFT and RL in Enhancing LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2505. 24273v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest that reinforcement learning (RL) effectively internalizes search strategies, yielding significant improvements on challenging reasoning tasks through extended chains of thought.

By Hongyi James Cai, Junlin Wang, Xiaoyin Chen, Bhuwan Dhingra
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Smart Picks in the Dark: Towards Efficient RLVR for Reasoning via Tracing Metacognitive Pivots

arXiv:2606. 04503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has greatly advanced large reasoning models (LRMs), but it requires timely training on a huge fully-annotated dataset.

By Guangcheng Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Haobo Wang, Xing Zheng, Yingfan MA, Xuening Feng, Zhongqi Chen, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
5d ago

Draft-Thinking: Learning Efficient Reasoning in Long Chain-of-Thought LLMs

arXiv:2603.00578v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Long chain-of-thought~(CoT) reasoning improves the problem-solving capability of large reasoning models~(LRMs), but often incurs substantial...

By Jie Cao, Tianwei Lin, Juekai Lin, Zhenxuan Fan, Yunqi Cao, Bo Yuan, Ziyuan Zhao, Rolan Yan, Wenqiao Zhang, Siliang Tang
arXiv AI
Jun 9

Correct Is Not Enough: Training Reasoning Planners with Executor-Grounded Rewards

arXiv:2605. 03862v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has become a common way to improve explicit reasoning in large language models, but final-answer correctness alone does not reveal whether the reasoning trace is faithful, reliable, or useful to the model that consumes it.

By Tianyang Han, Hengyu Shi, Junjie Hu, Xu Yang, Zhiling Wang, Junhao Su
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Learning to Stop without Learning to Stop: Self-Supervised Confidence Training Improves Reasoning Efficiency

The paper demonstrates that fine‑tuning reasoning models to predict their own confidence at intermediate steps—using only 600 self‑supervised examples—substantially improves inference efficiency. Without adding any explicit stopping or length penalties, the models generate up to 25 % fewer tokens while maintaining accuracy on mathematical, scientific, and coding benchmarks across several architectures. The study finds that confidence supervision preserves the models’ high‑level reasoning structure rather than merely suppressing specific behaviors.

By Parsa Hosseini, Akasha Tigalappanavara, Sumit Nawathe, Chenrui Fan, Sourya Basu, Genta Indra Winata, Anirban Das, Soheil Feizi, Nima Chitsazan
arXiv AI
1d ago

Diverse Reasoning Paths Matter: Symbolic Equivalence Augmentation for Enhancing RL Exploration

The paper introduces EquivAug, a data augmentation framework that applies symbolic equivalence transformations to chain-of-thought (CoT) solutions, generating diverse yet provably correct reasoning paths for supervised fine-tuning (SFT). By converting CoT solutions into formal symbolic representations, applying equivalence transformations, and reconstructing natural-language explanations, EquivAug produces training data that varies in reasoning steps rather than surface-level lexical differences. Experiments on GSM8K and FOLIO show that EquivAug consistently achieves the highest reasoning path diversity after SFT and the strongest accuracy after GRPO, establishing a positive correlation between CoT diversity during SFT and downstream reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) performance.

By Xiaoou Liu, Tiejin Chen, Hanyang Chen, Yuan Ling, Hua Wei
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Rethinking Generalization in Reasoning SFT: A Conditional Analysis on Optimization, Data, and Model Capability

arXiv:2604. 06628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes.

By Qihan Ren, Peng Wang, Ruikun Cai, Shuai Shao, Dadi Guo, Yuejin Xie, Yafu Li, Quanshi Zhang, Xia Hu, Jing Shao, Dongrui Liu