Negative Self-Distillation (NSD) is a new framework for improving large language models by encouraging them to diverge from their own flawed reasoning rather than imitate privileged solutions. Unlike On-Policy Self-Distillation, which can suppress uncertainty and exploratory behavior, NSD generates a question‑specific negative condition (e.g., a careless reasoner) and uses a dynamic gating mechanism to target only reasoning‑critical tokens for penalization. This approach preserves foundational language capabilities while consistently outperforming OPSD and other label‑free self‑bootstrapping reinforcement learning baselines.
By Rongcan Pei, Zhepei Wei, Shuyao Xu, Xinyu Zhu, Wei-Lin Chen, Yu Meng
arXiv:2603.02504v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance on natural language tasks but remain unreliable in mathematical reasoning, frequently gener...
By Pratibha Zunjare, Michael Hsiao
Negative Self-Distillation (NSD) is a new framework for improving large language models by encouraging them to diverge from their own flawed reasoning rather than imitate privileged solutions. Unlike On-Policy Self-Distillation (OPSD), which can suppress uncertainty and exploratory behavior, NSD generates a question‑specific negative condition (e.g., a careless reasoner) and pushes the student’s distribution away from it. A dynamic gating mechanism isolates reasoning‑critical tokens so that only behavioral flaws are penalized, preserving linguistic capabilities, and empirical results show NSD consistently outperforms OPSD and other label‑free self‑bootstrapping RL baselines.
arXiv:2606. 03269v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Visual Question Answering (VQA) is the task of answering questions about images, requiring the integration of multimodal input and reasoning.
By Thomas Eiter, Nelson Higuera Ruiz, Johannes Oetsch
arXiv:2609.39346v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) offer strong reasoning capabilities but are often costly to access through commercial APIs, while small language models (S...
By Bohan Zhang (Southeast University), Linan Yue (Southeast University), Weibo Gao (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), Pengyu Chen (Southeast University), Hong Guo (Southeast University), Yanqi Hao (ZTE Corporation)
arXiv:2510. 18428v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Optimization modeling underlies critical decision-making across industries, yet remains difficult to automate: natural-language problem descriptions must be translated into precise mathematical formulations and executable solver code.
By Minwei Kong, Ao Qu, Xiaotong Guo, Wenbin Ouyang, Chonghe Jiang, Han Zheng, Yining Ma, Dingyi Zhuang, Yuhan Tang, Junyi Li, Shenhao Wang, Haris Koutsopoulos, Hai Wang, Cathy Wu, Jinhua Zhao
arXiv:2607. 23019v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables large language models (LLMs) to tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, yet the generated intermediate steps are not guaranteed to be logically sound.
By Zirong Chen, Meiyi Ma
arXiv:2607. 20520v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on mathematical problem solving, yet prior work often treats representationally equivalent formulations as interchangeable and conflates reasoning errors with interface failures.
By Sagnik Nath, Edith Aurora Graf, Liang Zhang, Diego Zapata-Rivera
arXiv:2607. 18100v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Extended reasoning has become standard for frontier Large Language Models (LLMs), yet the trajectories these models produce remain largely uncontrollable.
By Sheldon Yu, Tong Yu, Xunyi Jiang, Rohan Surana, Gagan Mundada, Sungchul Kim, Lina Yao, Julian McAuley, Junda Wu
arXiv:2608.30256v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Logical reasoning with large language models (LLMs) is a critical capability, as it reflects a system's ability to correctly deduce hypotheses from a...
By Ramya Keerthy Thatikonda, Wray Buntine, Ehsan Shareghi
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.
By Chuxue Cao, Jinluan Yang, Haoran Li, Kunhao Pan, Zijian Zhao, Zhengyu Chen, Yuchen Tian, Lijun Wu, Conghui He, Sirui Han, Yike Guo
arXiv:2607. 06974v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly improve their reasoning at test time via additional computation, yet most existing works treat each problem in isolation.
By Ruilin Tong, Dong Gong