arXiv:2606. 10646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Token-level credit assignment remains a key obstacle for reinforcement learning (RL) in large language models (LLMs), where RL recipes typically treat all tokens equally, failing to distinguish decisive reasoning steps from routine formatting or fluent filler.
arXiv:2510. 13554v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The reasoning pattern of Large language models (LLMs) remains opaque, and reinforcement learning (RL) typically applies uniform credit across an entire generation, blurring the distinction between pivotal and routine steps.
The paper introduces RECAP, a redundancy-aware credit assignment method that improves reasoning efficiency in large language models by assigning credit to each reasoning step based on its downstream role and contribution to the correct answer. RECAP uses a semantic dependency graph to measure structural responsibility and evaluates step efficacy via changes in gold-answer log-likelihood, enabling step-specific updates without requiring a separate reward model or concise trajectories. Experiments on two 7B models across four mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that RECAP enhances the accuracy-efficiency trade-off, boosting pass@1 by 2.0–3.7 percentage points while cutting reasoning tokens by 8–31% compared to GRPO.
arXiv:2607. 21106v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Effective memory is crucial for LLM agents, yet constructing it effectively remains challenging.
arXiv:2607. 21106v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective memory is crucial for LLM agents, yet constructing it effectively remains challenging.
The paper introduces Stepwise Marginal Information Gain (MIG), an intrinsic process reward that evaluates how each reasoning step of a large language model (LLM) or vision-language model (VLM) improves the likelihood of the reference answer. MIG rewards only new likelihood maxima, preventing duplicate credit, and is combined with outcome, format, and self‑distillation objectives to guide training. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that this method outperforms outcome‑only reinforcement learning and improves accuracy by up to 4.8 points over binary‑reward training, including a 12.6‑point gain on MathVerse and a 12.9‑point advantage on vision‑language transfer at 7B parameters.
arXiv:2606. 16222v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on intermediate reasoning, yet explicit Chain-of-Thought (CoT) suffers from a linguistic space bottleneck: each thought must be decoded into tokens, causing high inference overhead.
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.
arXiv:2606. 11209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning.
arXiv:2608.31066v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning improves multi-step problem solving, but long reasoning traces inflate inference cost. Token-level CoT compression red...
arXiv:2607. 26119v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large reasoning models trained via reinforcement learning (RL) have been increasingly shown to outperform their supervised fine-tuned (SFT) counterparts on mathematical reasoning tasks; Yet the mechanistic basis for this advantage remains unclear.
arXiv:2607. 19345v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models that generate step-by-step reasoning traces have achieved strong performance on complex tasks, and extending them to long-context settings has emerged as an important frontier.
arXiv:2607. 16205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a standard approach for enhancing reasoning in large language models, which typically optimizes the policy by contrasting multiple self generated rollouts.