arXiv:2610.01627v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Difficulty is one of the most fundamental properties of a question: it determines whether the question can meaningfully discriminate between models o...
By Peng Cui, Qiaoyuan Zheng, Rudolf Debelak, Mrinmaya Sachan
arXiv:2605. 28742v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models can use verifiable rewards to improve at a wide variety of reasoning tasks.
By Linas Nasvytis, Simon Jerome Han, Ben Prystawski, Satchel Grant, Noah D. Goodman, Judith E. Fan
arXiv:2603. 13761v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Curriculum learning--ordering training examples in a sequence to aid machine learning--takes inspiration from human learning, but has not gained widespread acceptance.
By Amogh Inamdar, Zhenwei Tang, Ashton Anderson, Richard Zemel
arXiv:2509. 14704v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark saturation and training-data contamination increasingly obscure whether reported gains in large language models (LLMs) reflect genuine advances in reasoning or familiarity with recurring patterns in benchmark problems.
By Masaharu Mizumoto, Dat Nguyen, Zhiheng Han, Xingfu Li, Yo Nakawake, Le Minh Nguyen
The paper proposes a response‑free method for estimating difficulty of reading‑comprehension multiple‑choice items by fine‑tuning a transformer on item wording. It introduces two extensions to a baseline joint‑encoding model: a component‑wise variant that encodes passage, question, and options separately, and a multi‑task variant that adds a question‑answering auxiliary task. Experiments on a corpus of nearly 30,000 items show that both extensions outperform the baseline, especially the multi‑task variant across all metrics and the component‑wise variant in rank ordering, even with limited training data.
By Jan Net\'ik, Patr\'icia Martinkov\'a
arXiv:2607. 28634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The estimation of item difficulty plays a key role in both formative assessment and large-scale high-stakes summative assessments.
By Xinyi Wang, Hong Jiao, Ming Li, Sydney Peters, Hanna Choi, Tianyi Zhou, Qingshu Xu
arXiv:2510. 12171v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models have shown strong scientific reasoning ability, but their performance on materials science problems remains less studied.
By Junkai Zhang, Jingru Gan, Xiaoxuan Wang, Zian Jia, Changquan Gu, Jianpeng Chen, Yanqiao Zhu, Mingyu Derek Ma, Dawei Zhou, Ling Li, Wei Wang
arXiv:2511. 21692v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We investigate how well large language models (LLMs) generalize across different task difficulties, a key question for effective data curation and evaluation.
By Yeganeh Kordi, Nihal V. Nayak, Max Zuo, Ilana Nguyen, Stephen H. Bach
arXiv:2606. 07108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) demonstrate remarkable performance improvements by iteratively reflecting, exploring, and executing complex tasks, yet suffer from inefficiencies due to redundant reasoning, known as "overthinking".
By Tengyao Tu, Yulin Li, Hui-Ling Zhen, Libo Qin, Zhoujun Wei, Jinghua Piao, Zhuotao Tian, Yong Li, Min Zhang
arXiv:2510. 05969v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed on complex reasoning tasks, yet little is known about their ability to internally evaluate problem difficulty, which is an essential capability for adaptive reasoning and efficient resource allocation.
By Sunbowen Lee, Qingyu Yin, Chak Tou Leong, Jialiang Zhang, Yicheng Gong, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang, Xiaoyu Shen
arXiv:2510.01581v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Recent thinking models are capable of solving complex reasoning tasks by scaling test-time compute, but this scaling should be allocated in l...
By Joykirat Singh, Justin Chih-Yao Chen, Archiki Prasad, Elias Stengel-Eskin, Akshay Nambi, Mohit Bansal
arXiv:2609.09372v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Although MMLU is widely adopted as a benchmark for calibrating general AI capabilities, we psychometrically demonstrate that its aggregate score prim...
By Dana Paquin, Riddhiman Jain