Supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on a small, high-quality set of long reasoning traces is an effective approach for eliciting strong reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs). However, existing methods for curating high-quality SFT data rely heavily on strong reasoning models to filter examples based on diversity and difficulty, making the curation process costly while often yielding suboptimal data quality.
The paper surveys efficient reasoning in large language models, contrasting fast intuitive (System 1) and slow deep (System 2) reasoning. It analyzes why System 2 is computationally costly yet more accurate, and why System 1 is efficient but less effective. The survey covers causes of inefficiency, patterns of reasoning behavior, and potential solutions to balance performance and computational budgets, offering actionable insights and an open‑source repository for ongoing research.
By Rui Wang, Hongru Wang, Boyang Xue, Jianhui Pang, Shudong Liu, Yi Chen, Jiahao Qiu, Derek Fai Wong, Heng Ji, Kam-Fai Wong
arXiv:2509. 21013v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Given the prohibitive cost of pre-training large language models, it is essential to leverage smaller proxy models to optimize datasets before scaling up.
By Woosung Koh, Juyoung Suk, Sungjun Han, Se-Young Yun, Jamin Shin
arXiv:2604. 11996v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Should we trust Large Language Models (LLMs) with high accuracy?
By Manas Pathak, Xingyao Chen, Shuozhe Li, Amy Zhang, Liu Leqi
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
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:2608.31068v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: When a large language model fails a reasoning task, it is often assumed to lack the underlying capability. However, this conflates a genuine absence of...
By Qiyao Yan, Chenpeng Wang, Liangming Pan
arXiv:2606. 09856v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning typically focuses on deductive tasks such as mathematics and coding where correctness is verifiable.
By Liyi Zhang, Akshay K. Jagadish, Brenden M. Lake, Thomas L. Griffiths
arXiv:2601. 22642v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) show remarkable capabilities, yet their stochastic next-token prediction creates logical inconsistencies and reward hacking that formal symbolic systems avoid.
By Chuxue Cao, Jinluan Yang, Haoran Li, Kunhao Pan, Zijian Zhao, Zhengyu Chen, Yuchen Tian, Lijun Wu, Conghui He, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
arXiv:2604. 08571v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve high performance on standard mathematical benchmarks, their problem-solving abilities depend on the context and textual formatting.
By Pavel Golikov, Evgenii Opryshko, Gennady Pekhimenko, Mark C. Jeffrey
arXiv:2605. 28742v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models can use verifiable rewards to improve at a wide variety of reasoning tasks.
By Linas Nasvytis, Simon Jerome Han, Ben Prystawski, Satchel Grant, Noah D. Goodman, Judith E. Fan
The paper reports that in on‑policy distillation for large language models, reasoning performance can be improved by supervising only a tiny fraction of generated tokens—sometimes just one or two tokens per reasoning trajectory, about 0.05% of all tokens. This sparse supervision consistently matches or exceeds full‑token training across nine teacher‑student setups on mathematical reasoning, and is also validated on coding reasoning, Llama models, and PPO‑based reinforcement learning with verifiable reward. The findings suggest that effective post‑training does not require token‑intensive supervision and may align more closely with natural learning processes that focus on critical reasoning steps.
By Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Pan Xu, Karim Bouyarmane