arXiv AI

Probing the Origins of Reasoning Performance: Representational Quality for Mathematical Problem-Solving in RL vs. SFT Fine-Tuned Models

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 Machine Learning
Jun 9

Attention Illuminates LLM Reasoning: The Preplan-and-Anchor Rhythm Enables Fine-Grained Policy Optimization

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.

By Yang Li, Zhichen Dong, Yuhan Sun, Weixun Wang, Shaopan Xiong, Yijia Luo, Jiashun Liu, Han Lu, Jiamang Wang, Wenbo Su, Bo Zheng, Junchi Yan
arXiv AI
1d ago

Rethinking Generalization in Reasoning SFT: A Conditional Analysis on Optimization, Data, and Model Capability

arXiv:2604. 06628v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: A prevailing narrative in LLM post-training holds that supervised finetuning (SFT) memorizes while reinforcement learning (RL) generalizes.

By Qihan Ren, Peng Wang, Ruikun Cai, Shuai Shao, Dadi Guo, Yuejin Xie, Yafu Li, Quanshi Zhang, Xia Hu, Jing Shao, Dongrui Liu
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

SUPERNOVA: Eliciting General Reasoning in LLMs with Reinforcement Learning on Natural Instructions

arXiv:2604. 08477v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved reasoning in formal domains such as mathematics and code, but extending these gains beyond STEM remains challenging.

By Ashima Suvarna, Kendrick Phan, Mehrab Beikzadeh, Hritik Bansal, Saadia Gabriel
arXiv AI
Aug 11

How Much Backtracking is Enough? Exploring the Interplay of SFT and RL in Enhancing LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2505. 24273v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) suggest that reinforcement learning (RL) effectively internalizes search strategies, yielding significant improvements on challenging reasoning tasks through extended chains of thought.

By Hongyi James Cai, Junlin Wang, Xiaoyin Chen, Bhuwan Dhingra
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Architecture-Aware Reinforcement Learning Makes Sliding-Window Attention Competitive in Math Reasoning

arXiv:2606. 11634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid progress of reasoning and agentic large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for long-context inference, but self-attention (SA) scales quadratically with context length.

By Kai Liu, Peijie Dong, Xinchen Xie, Jianfei Gao, Qipeng Guo, Xiaowen Chu, Shaoting Zhang, Kai Chen
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