arXiv AI

ASDA: Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation for Financial Reasoning

ASDA (Automated Skill Distillation and Adaptation) is a framework that improves large language models on financial reasoning tasks without fine‑tuning. It works by having a teacher model analyze a student’s failures, cluster errors, and generate structured skill artifacts—reasoning procedures, code templates, and worked examples—that are injected during inference. On the FAMMA benchmark, ASDA boosts arithmetic reasoning by up to 17.33% and non‑arithmetic reasoning by 5.95%, outperforming existing training‑free methods.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Data-Centric Post-Training for Financial Reasoning: Mining, Distillation, and Verifiable Learning

The paper introduces a data‑centric pipeline for post‑training language models on financial reasoning tasks. It mines open‑source reasoning traces, distills financial instruction data, and generates knowledge‑graph‑guided question‑answer pairs, then filters examples with lightweight classifiers and applies reinforcement learning with rule‑based verifiers. Experiments on FINESSE‑Bench show that retention‑aware adaptation—self‑distilled fine‑tuning and model merging—outperforms ordinary supervised fine‑tuning, improving accuracy by up to 3.0 points and avoiding regressions.

By Zhirayr Hayrapetyan, Andrei Kalmykov, Denis Kokosinskii, Dmitry Stanishevskii, Dmitry Zmitrovich
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond Scaling Law: A Data-Efficient Distillation Framework for Reasoning

arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.

By Xiaojun Wu, Xiaoguang Jiang, Huiyang Li, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Qiaobo Hao, Huang Liu, Zhiguo Yang, Ji Xie, Ninglun Gu, Jin Yang, Kailai Zhang, Yelun Bao, Jun Wang
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 AI
Aug 11

Reason Wide, Not Deep: Amortizing the Reasoning Premium into Distilled Skills

arXiv:2608. 07885v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning modes of language models outperform their non-reasoning counterparts on multi-step agentic tasks, but pay a 3-6x premium in output tokens on every episode -- much of it spent re-deriving procedures that are shared across episodes of the same domain.

By Agamdeep Singh, Srishti Gautam, Priyanshu Gupta, Nikita Mehrotra, Tanmay Bakshi, Sumit Gulwani
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 24

PotARCin: Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Skill Acquisition in Abstract Reasoning Tasks

PotARCin expands the ARC benchmark by evaluating abstract reasoning across five dimensions—Definition, Classification, Constrained Generation, Editing, and Inversion—using programmatic generation of new task instances. The study shows a 25‑52 percentage‑point performance gap between standard ARC evaluation and PotARCin, and reveals that multi‑dimensional assessment can reorder models that appear equivalent under single‑metric accuracy. Additionally, a new held‑out set, P‑ARC, demonstrates low model accuracy (1‑8%) across all dimensions, highlighting the need for more comprehensive tests of abstract reasoning.

By Claas Beger, Ryan Yi, Melanie Mitchell
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Learning to Reason with Curriculum I: Provable Benefits of Autocurriculum

The paper investigates whether the high costs of training chain-of-thought reasoning models can be reduced through algorithmic design. It introduces an autocurriculum approach that lets the model select which problems to focus on during training, showing that this method provably improves both supervised fine‑tuning and reinforcement learning. For supervised fine‑tuning, autocurriculum requires exponentially fewer reasoning demonstrations by targeting prompts where the model struggles, while for reinforcement learning it decouples computational cost from the quality of the reference model, making the burn‑in cost nearly independent of target accuracy.

By Nived Rajaraman, Audrey Huang, Miro Dudik, Robert Schapire, Dylan J. Foster, Akshay Krishnamurthy