arXiv:2601. 15158v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Transformers trained via Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-based supervision can spontaneously develop the ability to generate intermediate reasoning steps (Chain-of-Thought).
By Yuval Ran-Milo, Yotam Alexander, Shahar Mendel, Nadav Cohen
arXiv:2602. 14872v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been a main driver of recent breakthroughs in large reasoning models.
By Yu Huang, Zixin Wen, Yuejie Chi, Yuting Wei, Aarti Singh, Yingbin Liang, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2603. 17019v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A central question in the debate over large language models is whether transformers can learn rules they have never seen, or whether they can only interpolate: predict new cases from their similarity to training examples.
By Andy Gray
arXiv:2607. 11875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models.
By Tiberiu Musat, Tiago Pimentel, Nicholas Zucchet, Thomas Hofmann
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: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
arXiv:2606. 00183v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Tree search is a central abstraction behind many language-agent reasoning and decision-making tasks: agents must explore actions, remember failures, and backtrack toward promising alternatives.
By Tong Yang, Yu Huang, Yingbin Liang, Yuejie Chi
arXiv:2602. 07832v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Process rewards have been widely used in deep reinforcement learning to improve training efficiency, reduce variance, and prevent reward hacking.
By Xian Wu, Kaijie Zhu, Ying Zhang, Lun Wang, Wenbo Guo
arXiv:2607. 11506v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) optimizes LLMs using sparse verifiable final-answer rewards.
By Xiaojian Liu, Han Xu, Jianqiang Xia, Zhixuan Li, Ke Xu, Yiwei Dai, Xinran Chen, Changwo Wu, Yuchen Li
arXiv:2607. 01232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a central component of post-training large language models (LLMs), yet little is understood about how RL adaptation is distributed across transformer layers.
By Zijian Zhang, Rizhen Hu, Athanasios Glentis, Dawei Li, Chung-Yiu Yau, Hongzhou Lin, Mingyi Hong
arXiv:2607. 07646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Does RL post-training merely amplify primitive skills already latent in a base model, or can it compose primitive skills into new higher-level strategies?
By Azwar Abdulsalam, Nishil Patel, Andrew Saxe
We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning.