The paper demonstrates that fine‑tuning reasoning models to predict their own confidence at intermediate steps—using only 600 self‑supervised examples—substantially improves inference efficiency. Without adding any explicit stopping or length penalties, the models generate up to 25 % fewer tokens while maintaining accuracy on mathematical, scientific, and coding benchmarks across several architectures. The study finds that confidence supervision preserves the models’ high‑level reasoning structure rather than merely suppressing specific behaviors.
By Parsa Hosseini, Akasha Tigalappanavara, Sumit Nawathe, Chenrui Fan, Sourya Basu, Genta Indra Winata, Anirban Das, Soheil Feizi, Nima Chitsazan
The paper introduces a method to control reasoning behaviors in Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) language models by labeling sentence-level segments with six distinct reasoning behaviors (planning, execution, restatement, fact, reflection, and conclusion). Linear probes on MoE router logits can predict these behaviors nearly as accurately as probes on the full hidden state, enabling the authors to edit router scores during inference to reduce overthinking. This intervention cuts generated tokens by a median of 30.4% (up to 63.3%) across multiple models and benchmarks without significant loss in accuracy, and often improves it.
By Shengjie Wang, Mohsen Fayyaz, Nanyun Peng
arXiv:2601. 04805v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large reasoning models (LRMs) have attracted much attention due to their exceptional performance.
By Siyuan Gan, Jiaheng Liu, Boyan Wang, Tianpei Yang, Runqing Miao, Yuyao Zhang, Fanyu Meng, Junlan Feng, Linjian Meng, Jing Huo, Yang Gao
ClueTracer is a training‑free, parameter‑free plugin that suppresses hallucinations in multimodal reasoning models by tracing how visual clues propagate from the question through the model’s reasoning pathway. It localizes task‑relevant image patches while ignoring irrelevant regions, thereby addressing the problem of reasoning drift where models over‑focus on question‑irrelevant entities. The method improves performance across various reasoning architectures by an average of 1.21× on reasoning benchmarks.
By Gongli Xi, Kun Wang, Zeming Gao, Huahui Yi, Haolang Lu, Qianshan Wei, Ye Tian, Wendong Wang
The paper introduces Gradient Fingerprint (GRIFT), a technique that uses a model’s internal gradient computations to detect reward hacking in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. GRIFT compresses gradients of a chain-of-thought (CoT) conditioned on a prompt into a compact representation, which is then used to assess whether the CoT reflects reward hacking. Experiments on math, code, and logical reasoning benchmarks show GRIFT outperforms baselines by over 25% and, when integrated into a rejection fine‑tuning pipeline, reduces reward hacking while improving task performance.
By Songtao Wang, Quang Hieu Pham, Fangcong Yin, Xinpeng Wang, Jocelyn Qiaochu Chen, Greg Durrett, Xi Ye
arXiv:2605.11467v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Reasoning models post-hoc rationalize answers they have already committed to internally, producing chains of *reasoning theater*: deliberativ...
By Swapnil Parekh, Naman Goyal
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.
By Bryce Little
arXiv:2510. 19990v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The reasoning paradigm, where language models reason before answering, has enabled breakthroughs on tasks such as mathematical problem-solving.
By Zachary Horvitz, Raghav Singhal, Hao Zou, Carles Domingo-Enrich, Zhou Yu, Rajesh Ranganath, Kathleen McKeown
arXiv:2607. 22864v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) excel at visual interpretation but fail on spatial reasoning tasks that humans solve reliably.
By Patrick Rim, Tom Long, Ekta Prashnani, Ruth Rosenholtz, Ben Boudaoud, Peter Xenopoulos, Alex Wong, Joohwan Kim, Jae-Hyun Jung
arXiv:2606. 02835v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) improve performance by generating explicit intermediate reasoning traces through increased test-time compute, yet the assumption that longer reasoning is consistently beneficial remains under-examined.
By Simone Caldarella, Davide Talon, Rahaf Aljundi, Elisa Ricci, Massimiliano Mancini
The paper introduces Selective Probability Mass Concentration (sPMC), a training framework that strengthens implicit visual grounding in multimodal large language models by selectively regularizing attention heads most responsive to visual evidence. sPMC treats attention over visual tokens as a spatial probability distribution and encourages mass to concentrate on semantically relevant regions using segmentation-derived priors, while leaving other heads unconstrained. Across six multimodal benchmarks, sPMC yields an average zero‑shot improvement of 3% and gains up to 11.3% for various models by regularizing only 3%–15% of their attention heads.
By Jiaqi Deng, Zonghan Wu, Zhan Heng, Xiaoshui Huang, Huan Huo, Guandong Xu
arXiv:2608. 09898v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time scaling often uses an external verifier, such as compilers and test cases in coding or trained value functions in robotics applications, to obtain high-quality rollouts.
By Lecheng Kong, Like Hui, Haitao Mao, Jun Huan