arXiv Machine Learning

Teaching Models to Teach Themselves: Reasoning at the Edge of Learnability

arXiv:2601. 18778v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: RL methods for scaling large reasoning models stall on datasets with low initial success rates, and thus little training signal.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Question Begets Question: Self-Evolving Curriculum for Reinforcement Fine-Tuning on Competition Mathematics

arXiv:2608. 01522v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Teaching a language model a skill it has not mastered is obstructed by three recurring difficulties: training data is scarce, ground-truth reasoning traces are usually unavailable, and models often exhibit an apparent ceiling beyond which additional data yields no further improvement.

By Longtian Bao, Jianyou Wang, Yang Zhang, Youze Zheng, Ramamohan Paturi
arXiv AI
Jun 9

CLPO: Curriculum Learning meets Policy Optimization for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2509. 25004v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Online reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become an effective paradigm for improving the reasoning abilities of large language models, but most methods still optimize reasoning trajectories over the static problem set, wasting rollout budget on solved or overly difficult problems.

By Shijie Zhang, Zheng Xiao, Shiyu Liu, Guohao Sun, Kevin Zhang, Xiang Guo, Rujun Guo, Shaoyu Liu, Wangxiao Zhao, Guanjun Jiang
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Boosting LLM Reasoning via Human-Inspired Reward Shaping

The paper introduces T2T (Thickening-to-Thinning), a dynamic reward framework for large language models that mimics human learning by separating exploration and consolidation phases. During incorrect attempts, T2T encourages exploration to broaden the search space, while after correct solutions it applies length penalties to promote concise reasoning. Experiments on mathematical benchmarks across five mainstream LLMs show that T2T outperforms standard GRPO and recent baselines, improving overall reasoning performance.

By Wenze Lin, Zhen Yang, Xitai Jiang, Xiaoteng Ma, Gao Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

Ladders of Thought: A Self-Evolving Curriculum of Progressively Simplified Reasoning Traces

Ladders-of-Thought (LoT) is a framework that enhances reasoning in small- to mid-scale large language models by automatically generating easier variants of reasoning problems and organizing them into difficulty buckets. It uses a self‑evolving bandit scheduler to adaptively allocate training, improving performance across math and multi‑hop reasoning tasks on 1–8 B models. LoT achieves significant gains (e.g., +32 pp on AddSub, +16 pp on QASC) and converges faster than staged curricula.

By Minghui Liu, Thomas Magelinski, Dehao Yuan, Qi Yu, Furong Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 12

Scaling Self-Play with Self-Guidance

arXiv:2604. 20209v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: LLM self-play algorithms are notable in that, in principle, nothing bounds their learning: a Conjecturer model creates problems for a Solver, and both improve together.

By Luke Bailey, Kaiyue Wen, Kefan Dong, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Tengyu Ma
arXiv AI
Jul 14

BRIDGE: Bridging Reasoning In Distillation Gap Elimination via Structure-Aware Masking

arXiv:2602. 17686v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning has significantly improved LLMs' mathematical problem-solving capabilities, but distilling such capabilities into smaller models remains challenging due to the capacity mismatch between verbose teachers and compact students.

By Bowen Yu, Sheng Zhang, Binhao Wang, Yi Wen, Jingtong Gao, Bowen Liu, Zimo Zhao, Shanshan Ye, Wanyu Wang, Maolin Wang, Xiangyu Zhao