arXiv:2606. 25524v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) reach high accuracy in mathematical reasoning, but individual traces on the same problem diverge; some arrive at the correct answer while others fail.
arXiv:2606. 01682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths.
The paper introduces Divergent Token Confidence (DTC), a method that estimates large language model confidence by counting tokens where two models strongly disagree during decoding. DTC uses Jensen-Shannon divergence between next-token distributions along the same reasoning trajectory and shows a near-negative correlation with answer accuracy. Experiments on multiple model families and six mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that DTC improves calibration over traditional probability-based and verbalized baselines, achieving lower expected calibration errors in both white-box and black-box settings.
As the chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities of large language models improve, evaluating and calibrating their reasoning confidence is becoming increasingly important for quantifying the uncertaint...
arXiv:2607. 09999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We show that post-training quantization can silently alter how large language models reason even when task accuracy is preserved.
arXiv:2606. 02011v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) rely on long reasoning traces, making inference expensive.
arXiv:2505. 12992v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inference-time scaling techniques have significantly bolstered the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by harnessing additional computational effort at inference without retraining.
Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths. PRM guided search avoids this by scoring candidate continuations during generation, but requires a reward model trained with step-level labels.
The paper introduces Trimmed Logit-Gap SFT (TrimSFT), a token-level reweighting strategy that adjusts supervised fine-tuning loss based on the logit gap between the correct token and its strongest competitor. TrimSFT trims supervision from tokens that are either already mastered (large logit gap) or poorly supported (small or negative logit gap), focusing learning on tokens with intermediate logit gaps. Experiments on six base models across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that TrimSFT consistently outperforms standard SFT, achieving the best average performance on five of six models and up to +26.9 points on MATH500.
arXiv:2604. 11996v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Should we trust Large Language Models (LLMs) with high accuracy?
arXiv:2607. 20129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quantized small autoregressive reasoning models can enter long, repetitive, or unproductive trajectories, yet inference-time compute is usually allocated without observing how a trajectory develops.
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.
arXiv:2608. 09836v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy distillation (OPD) has emerged as a core component of modern LLM post-training pipelines, yet we reveal a failure mode: degenerate agreement, where students exploit repetitive loops to achieve near-perfect token agreement with the teacher despite globally flawed responses.