Hugging Face Blog

Apriel-H1: The Surprising Key to Distilling Efficient Reasoning Models

arXiv AI
Oct 12

BoundaryEvo: Data-Model Co-Evolution at the Capability Boundary for Long-Chain Reasoning Distillation

BoundaryEvo introduces a two‑stage data‑model co‑evolution framework for distilling long‑chain reasoning from large teacher models into small language models. First, Capability Priming distills a small set of teacher trajectories to give the student an initial reasoning baseline. Then, Capability‑Boundary Co‑Evolution iteratively selects questions the student has not mastered but the teacher can solve, updating the training data as the student’s capability grows. With only 1,000 examples, BoundaryEvo improves Qwen3.5‑4B accuracy from 62.9 % to 75.3 % on IMO‑AnswerBench and from 26.8 % to 46.0 % on AMO‑Bench, outperforming static and dynamic baselines across 11 benchmarks.

By Jiaming Su, Suorong Yang, Xudong Li, Tengchao Yang, Peng Ye
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 3

The Missing Primitive: Diagnosing and Repairing Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

arXiv:2610. 02191v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated striking capabilities on frontier mathematical problems, it remains unclear whether they possess the structural mathematical understanding underlying their solutions.

By Shuo Xing, Zilin Dai, Chengyuan Qian, Fangzhou Lin, Wenjing Chen, Ping He, Pan Lu, Alvaro Velasquez, Mohit Bansal, Zhengzhong Tu
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Evaluation is All You Need: Strategic Overclaiming of LLM Reasoning Capabilities Through Evaluation Design

The paper examines how evaluation design can cause significant fluctuations in the benchmark results of reasoning models, particularly the Deepseek‑R1‑Distill series. It shows that subtle changes in evaluation conditions lead to large variations in reported performance, a phenomenon also seen in other open‑source models fine‑tuned from Deepseek‑R1‑Distill and in the QwQ‑32B model. The authors call for a more rigorous evaluation paradigm and provide empirical assessments of the Deepseek‑R1‑Distill models.

By Yongfu Zhu, Lin Sun, Jinzhu Wu, Weihong Lin, Xiaoqi Jian, Guangxiang Zhao, Change Jia, Linglin Zhang, Sai-er Hu, Yuhan Wu, Xiangzheng Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Efficient Reasoning via Constrained Optimization in Latent Space

Large Reasoning Models often overthink, producing redundant reasoning steps that consume many tokens. The authors observe that efficient reasoning steps cluster in a concentrated region of latent space, while verbose steps lie outside this region. By projecting deviating hidden states back into the region via a quadratic program, they propose a training‑free framework that cuts token generation by up to 52.8% while improving accuracy by up to 12.1% across several benchmarks.

By Zhinan Hou, Xingchen Li, Keyou You
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Do Language Models Follow Occam's Razor? An Evaluation of Parsimony in Inductive and Abductive Reasoning

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) follow Occam's Razor when performing inductive and abductive reasoning. It introduces a synthetic framework for generating questions that require both types of reasoning and a new automated metric to evaluate the simplicity and correctness of generated hypotheses. Experiments show that while LLMs can handle simple scenarios, they struggle with complex world models and producing high‑quality, simplest hypotheses, even when using advanced reasoning techniques.

By Yunxin Sun, Abulhair Saparov