arXiv:2609.38764v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Language models are typically pretrained from random initialization. Recent work challenges this convention, showing that a brief warm-up on abstract,...
By Zachary Shinnick, Hemanth Saratchandran, Damien Teney, Anton van den Hengel
Large Language Models fail at implicit multi-hop reasoning: a model answers "When was $X$ born? " and "Who is $Y$'s closest friend?
arXiv:2410.17021v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models with chain-of-thought prompting, such as OpenAI-o1, have shown impressive capabilities in natural language inference tasks. H...
By Xiaochen Wang, Liang Chen, Reza Haf Zhe Yang, Yiru Wang, Xiangdi Meng, Kunhao Pan, Zhifang Sui, Junqing He
arXiv:2609.34187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: The strong version of the stochastic parrot argument claims that, although large language models (LLMs) may exceed rote regurgitation, they c...
By Julia Witte Zimmerman, Calla G. Beauregard, Tabia Tanzin Prama, Parisa Suchdev, Kathryn Cramer, Elisabeth Kollrack
Large Language Models struggle with implicit multi‑hop reasoning, correctly answering individual facts but failing to combine them in a single pass. In a controlled setting, the authors show that this failure persists even with high 1‑hop accuracy, indicating it is due to pretraining exposure rather than missing knowledge. They test nine data‑centric augmentation formats and find that only individuals seen in compositional contexts during pretraining enable transfer to unseen questions, proving exposure to such contexts is necessary for implicit multi‑hop reasoning.
By Yannis Karmim, Luis Marti, Djam\'e Seddah, Valentin Barri\`ere
arXiv:2606. 17945v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models provide a tractable system for asking how intelligence itself emerges, rather than only how LLMs can be engineered.
By Liangkai Hang, Junjie Yao, Zhiyu Li, Feiyu Xiong, Hongkang Yang, Zhi-Qin John Xu
Large language models can solve complex multi‑hop tasks but often fail on simple two‑hop queries, even when each hop is individually correct. In a controlled symbolic setting, the authors find that models generalize reliably when the second hop follows the training distribution, but always fail when it deviates. Mechanistic analysis shows that successful generalization relies on consistent intermediate representations across contexts, whereas failures arise from a mismatch between lower‑layer representation construction and upper‑layer mapping to outputs. The study proposes a recurrent‑style training strategy that improves out‑of‑distribution two‑hop generalization.
By Zili Zhang, Yilin Wang, Heng Wang, Herun Wan, Minnan Luo
arXiv:2608. 03930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-pretraining language models (LMs) on symbolic data can accelerate and improve natural language acquisition.
By Jo-Ku Cheng, Nikolaos Aletras, Marco Valentino
arXiv:2604. 07822v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We study implicit reasoning, i.
By Harsh Kohli, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Huan Sun, Yuekun Yao
arXiv:2607. 16097v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central to improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks, yet RL post-training is largely studied in isolation from the pretraining that precedes it.
By Jingyan Shen, Ang Li, Salman Rahman, Yifan Sun, Micah Goldblum, Matus Telgarsky, Pavel Izmailov
arXiv:2609.37891v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Current pre-training datasets are derived from web crawls, with all their issues, and were not designed to support mid- and post-training pipelines--...
By Pierre-Carl Langlais, Pieter Delobelle, Yannick Detrois, Pavel Chizhov, Carlos Rosas-Hinostroza, Neil Si Smail, Benjamin Burtin, Hanna Shcharbakova, Ivan Yamshchikov, Anastasia Stasenko
The paper presents practical training recipes for looped language models, showing that a compute‑efficient pipeline can reduce the training budget from 7.7 T tokens to 310 B tokens while maintaining strong reasoning performance. In controlled experiments, a 1.4 B LoopLM outperforms a parameter‑matched dense model on 12 benchmarks, achieving significant gains on GSM8K, MATH, and DROP, and approaches a 3.9 B dense model at matched inference compute. The authors also provide a minimal recipe to convert pretrained dense models into looped ones, demonstrating improvements on Qwen3‑1.7B‑Base across multiple data regimes.
By Andrei Marchenko, Viacheslav Bezrukov, Oleg Kashurin, Inessa Fedorova, Dmitry Bocharov, Yuliana Shakhvalieva, Maria Tikhonova, Valerii Ternovskii