Length Penalties Make Chain-of-Thought Less Monitorable
arXiv:2607. 09786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Length-penalized reinforcement learning can shorten chain-of-thought reasoning while hiding an influence that drives the model's answer.
arXiv:2607. 09786v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Length-penalized reinforcement learning can shorten chain-of-thought reasoning while hiding an influence that drives the model's answer.
The paper introduces Drift-Constrained Optimization (DCO), a framework that treats behavioral drift during fine‑tuning of instruction models as a bounded constraint rather than an uncontrolled side effect. By defining a drift budget, the authors reformulate fine‑tuning as a direction‑selection problem, showing that choosing different update directions can qualitatively change outcomes. Experiments on Qwen3 models demonstrate that carefully selected directions improve scientific reasoning and multilingual translation while preserving reasoning capabilities and general performance.
arXiv:2607. 21692v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse attention reduces the cost of long contexts by allowing each query to read only selected parts of the input.
arXiv:2606. 01080v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models often improve on difficult tasks by spending inference-time compute on a reasoning trace before producing the final answer.
arXiv:2607. 21692v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sparse attention prunes a long context to the blocks a model needs, and the usual selector is distilled from a dense teacher's attention.
The paper evaluates how three large mixture‑of‑experts models (Alibaba, OpenAI, NVIDIA) can be fine‑tuned to reason in a low‑resource language, specifically Greek. Accuracy metrics show little change, but the authors uncover significant qualitative improvements: after supervised fine‑tuning, models reason in Greek on ~98% of items, with better grammaticality and retained general ability. Reinforcement learning with pre‑registered rewards further eliminates reasoning‑channel leaks and format skips, while the Greek‑reasoning habit remains robust to an accuracy‑only gradient.
The paper introduces WebMRE, an offline benchmark comprising 541 tasks and 5,293 steps extracted from WebArena trajectories, designed to provide deterministic scoring for web agents without live environments. It enables the first systematic study of how guide sentences and grounded actions reinforce each other, showing that jointly decoding a guide improves element selection accuracy and that the guide acts as a causal instruction channel. The authors fine‑tune models that outperform leading zero‑shot baselines on all offline metrics.
arXiv:2606. 15390v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM agents can improve without weight updates by accumulating natural-language skills from experience, but current systems entrust every decision about which skills to keep and how to apply them to LLM judgment alone.
arXiv:2606. 11198v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems inject external knowledge to improve LLM outputs, yet the format of injected content -- distinct from its semantic relevance -- can independently distort the model's attention distribution.
arXiv:2607. 01104v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In Large Language Model (LLM) training, data mixing plays a pivotal role in determining model performance.
arXiv:2509. 17314v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Software increasingly relies on the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), from natural language understanding to program analysis and generation.
arXiv:2607. 29062v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model capabilities have improved in large part due to scaling chain of thought.