arXiv AI

Masked Distillation: Internalizing the Chain-of-Thought in Language Models

arXiv:2607. 22629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) produce long, explicit chains of intermediate steps before generating a final answer at inference time.

arXiv AI
Jul 3

Purified OPSD: On-Policy Self-Distillation Without Losing How to Think

arXiv:2607. 02234v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving LLM reasoning, where a privileged teacher with access to reference solutions provides token-level supervision on the student's own generated trajectories.

By Zhanming Shen, Jintao Tong, Shaotian Yan, Chen Shen, Hao Chen, Wentao Ye, Xiaomeng Hu, Rui Miao, Haobo Wang, Junbo Zhao, Gang Chen, Jieping Ye
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Latent Recurrent Thoughts: Recurrent Refinement of Proposed Latents for Reasoning with Frozen LLMs

Latent Recurrent Thoughts (LRT) proposes a method for reasoning with frozen large language models by operating in the model’s continuous representation space. A small auxiliary network generates initial latent vectors, which a tiny recurrent reasoner refines over multiple steps, decoupling computational depth from model size. Experiments on symbolic and natural‑language reasoning tasks show that LRT outperforms prior frozen‑decoder continuous‑space methods and chain‑of‑thought prompting while using far less inference compute.

By Zhaoliang Chen, Jie Fu
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
Sep 4

</think> Doesn't Stop Reasoning: Analysis of Spurious CoT Termination

The paper investigates a training‑free early‑exit technique that inserts an end‑of‑think (EoT) token to terminate chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning in large reasoning models. It finds that the injected EoT often fails to cleanly switch the model from reasoning to answering, leading to continued reasoning‑like generation—termed spurious CoT termination—whose length scales with the amount of reasoning saved. By increasing attention to the EoT token through Exit‑token Attention Biasing (EAB), the authors reduce spurious termination and shorten the answering phase across multiple models and benchmarks.

By Seunghee Koh, Sungjae Choi, Minchan Kwon, Sunghyun Baek, Junmo Kim