arXiv:2608. 03930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Pre-pretraining language models (LMs) on symbolic data can accelerate and improve natural language acquisition.
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.
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,...
The paper investigates how different forms of compressed chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning—Explicit, Composed, and Implicit—affect large language model (LLM) performance after supervised fine‑tuning (SFT). Using a synthetic compositional reasoning task, the authors show that coarser CoT requires more SFT data, that Composed and Implicit CoT benefit more from data scaling (with Composed also benefiting from repetition), and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can decompose compressed steps learned during SFT. Additionally, unidirectional CoT ordering improves generalization on longer sequential tasks.
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.
The study evaluates synthetic pre‑pretraining (PPT) across a wide range of models (500 M–7 B parameters) and training budgets (up to 100 B tokens). Results show that PPT consistently improves downstream performance and token efficiency, saving at least 21 B tokens at the 3 B scale, but these gains do not appear to stem from a grammatical prior. Instead, PPT benefits arise from tasks that enhance long‑range retrieval, and the improvements remain robust across diverse data mixtures, diminishing only when web text is omitted.
arXiv:2606. 25987v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) attain remarkable surface fluency on code, yet they neither formally guarantee the syntactic validity of their output nor leverage the hierarchical structure defining the target language.
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.
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.
arXiv:2604.17614v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Skills are a natural unit for describing what a language model can do and how its behavior can be changed. However, existing characterization...
arXiv:2606. 16934v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reasoning with a Code Interpreter (CI) has emerged as an effective paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through executable computation and iterative verification.
arXiv:2609.37066v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training is central to mathematical reasoning in modern large language models (LLMs), but endpoint pass@1 alone underidentifies what has changed...
arXiv:2607. 01585v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predicate invention (PI), the creation of new predicates to extend the hypothesis space, remains a critical bottleneck in Inductive Logic Programming (ILP).