arXiv AI

From "Aha Moments" to Controllable Thinking: Toward Meta-Cognitive Reasoning in Large Reasoning Models via Decoupled Reasoning and Control

arXiv:2508. 04460v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can exhibit step-by-step reasoning, reflection, and backtracking, but these behaviors are often unregulated, leading to overthinking.

arXiv AI
6d ago

Learning to Stop without Learning to Stop: Self-Supervised Confidence Training Improves Reasoning Efficiency

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
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Smart Picks in the Dark: Towards Efficient RLVR for Reasoning via Tracing Metacognitive Pivots

arXiv:2606. 04503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has greatly advanced large reasoning models (LRMs), but it requires timely training on a huge fully-annotated dataset.

By Guangcheng Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Haobo Wang, Xing Zheng, Yingfan MA, Xuening Feng, Zhongqi Chen, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
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