arXiv AI

NormTune: Norm-Guided Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Reasoning-Intensive Tasks

NormTune introduces a norm‑guided approach to parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning (PEFT) for reasoning‑intensive tasks, addressing a performance gap caused by under‑adaptation in weight‑update norms. By adaptively strengthening layers with insufficient updates, NormTune consistently improves various PEFT methods across challenging benchmarks. Experiments show significant accuracy gains—up to 24.24% with rank‑8 LoRA on S1K‑1.1—while rank‑256 variants match full fine‑tuning performance.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

GRIP: Granular Reward-Guided Parameter Interpolation for Efficient Reasoning

GRIP (Granular Reward-guided Interpolation of Parameters) is a lightweight framework that blends a reasoning-oriented large language model with an instruction-tuned model by assigning learnable interpolation ratios to individual modules. The ratios are optimized while keeping both source models frozen, using a reward signal that prefers correct and concise responses. Experiments demonstrate that GRIP improves the accuracy-efficiency trade-off compared to fixed or search-based merging baselines and uncover module-wise fusion patterns linked to efficient reasoning.

By Lam So, Canhui Wu, Han Lin
arXiv AI
Aug 11

Thought-Level Beam Search for Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 08020v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time compute scaling is a primary driver of performance in large reasoning models (LRMs), but extreme inefficiency bounds current approaches, shifting the critical question from \emph{how much} compute to spend, to \emph{where} to allocate it.

By Lijie Yang, Hongyin Luo, Tri Dao, Ravi Netravali
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

ChainDoRA: Tensor-Train Factorized Weight-Decomposed Low-Rank Adaptation for Parameter-Efficient LLM Fine-Tuning

ChainDoRA is a new parameter‑efficient fine‑tuning framework for large language models that replaces the dense low‑rank factorization of LoRA with a connected Tensor‑Train (TT) chain. By separating weight magnitude and direction and using a TT rank to control representation capacity, ChainDoRA achieves higher average accuracy on seven commonsense reasoning benchmarks while dramatically reducing trainable parameters—down to 5.35 M versus 56 M for LoRA and DoRA. Ablation studies show that the TT parameterization offers controllable trade‑offs between parameter cost and accuracy.

By Ashfak Yeafi, Mehedi Hasan, Md Khairul Islam
arXiv AI
Sep 17

OBC-Prune: Outcome-Based Calibration for Large Reasoning Model Pruning

OBC‑Prune introduces an outcome‑based calibration approach for pruning large reasoning models, focusing on the causal importance of each reasoning sentence rather than uniform activation salience. By pairing correct and incorrect rollouts and using intervention‑based analysis, it assigns per‑token weights that guide one‑shot pruning methods such as SparseGPT, Wanda, and ALPS. Experiments on DeepSeek‑R1‑Distill‑Qwen models show consistent accuracy gains and shorter reasoning traces across multiple benchmarks at 40‑50% sparsity.

By Ha Lan Nguyen, Huy Hoang Tran, Trac-Duy Tran, Dung D. Le
arXiv AI
Oct 28

Difficulty-Estimated Policy Optimization

Difficulty-Estimated Policy Optimization (DEPO) is a new framework that improves the efficiency and robustness of reasoning alignment in Large Reasoning Models. It introduces an online Difficulty Estimator that filters training data before rollouts, ensuring computational resources focus on high‑learning‑potential samples. Empirical results show DEPO achieves about 1.86× faster rollouts than DAPO and outperforms GRPO on benchmarks at similar training costs.

By Yu Zhao, Fan Jiang, Tianle Liu, Bo Zeng, Xintong Wang, Jiaxuan Teng, Yu Liu, Yichao Du
arXiv AI
Jul 28

DeepLook: Deeper Thinking with Lookahead

arXiv:2607. 22602v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inference-time scaling has emerged as a powerful paradigm for improving large language model reasoning, often delivering larger gains on difficult reasoning tasks than parameter scaling alone.

By Tingxin Yang, Zefeng Wang, Mengyue Wang, Xingcheng Zhou, Yunpu Ma