arXiv AI

Grounded Chess Reasoning in Language Models via Master Distillation

arXiv:2603. 20510v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Language models often lack grounded reasoning capabilities in specialized domains where training data is scarce but bespoke systems excel.

arXiv AI
6d ago

Self-Play Search Distillation for Large Language Model Reasoning

Self-Play Search Distillation (SPSD) is a framework that generates superhuman synthetic data by having MuZero-like networks play board games in executable environments. The search records are converted into structured reasoning chains that serve as environment‑grounded supervision for training large language models. When applied to Qwen3‑4B‑Base, SPSD improves performance on six mathematics benchmarks from 24.1 to 36.6 and raises the win rate on unseen games from 15% to 45%.

By Lorenzo Molfetta, Wai-Chung Kwan, Giacomo Frisoni, Luca Ragazzi, Gianluca Moro, Pavlos Vougiouklis, Jeff Z. Pan, Pasquale Minervini
arXiv Computer Vision
Aug 28

Reason in the Words You Speak: Idiolectal Paraphrasing Off-Policy Traces for Reasoning Distillation in VideoLLMs

The paper introduces Echo-GRPO, a method that rewrites privileged reasoning traces into a model’s own idiolect to align off‑policy supervision with the student policy’s vocabulary. By preserving semantics through Dual‑Reference Decoding, Echo‑GRPO mitigates gradient clipping on critical reasoning tokens and improves reasoning distillation. The approach is instantiated as VideoEcho‑R1 for video reasoning, yielding consistent gains across multiple multimodal LLM backbones and benchmarks, and it can be applied as a plug‑in to both RL and supervised fine‑tuning frameworks.

By Ji Soo Lee, Jinyoung Park, Seohyun Lee, Jongha Kim, Joonmyung Choi, Jinsung Yoon, Hyunwoo J. Kim
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
Sep 16

The Imitation Game: When LLMs Learn to Reason Like Programs via Code-Centric Reasoning Data Synthesis

The paper introduces MIMIC, a framework that uses executable code to generate rigorous reasoning data for large language models (LLMs). By converting algorithms into verifiable reasoning trajectories through narrative fusion, code-guided test synthesis, and dynamic code instrumentation, MIMIC creates a Code-Instrumented Reward (CIR) that supplies dense, high‑fidelity supervision for reinforcement learning. Models trained with MIMIC’s synthetic dataset show significant, consistent improvements in general reasoning, complex mathematics, and fine‑grained deterministic tasks.

By Jinyang Zhang, Weibin Liao, Keqin Bao, Sihang Li, Shaobo Wang, Muyang Ye, Hongxin Ding, Yue Fang, Tianyi Tang, Fei Huang, Kexin Yang, Xingzhang Ren, Dayiheng Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 5

ReflectRL: Learning from Golden Negative Trajectories via Reflective-to-Direct Reasoning

arXiv:2608. 03972v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: On-policy training has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, and is often enhanced by golden trajectories from stronger expert models.

By Jinhe Bi, Chennan Zhou, Zengjie Jin, Aniri, Shuo Lu, Wenke Huang, Hu Cao, Xun Xiao, Zhihong Zhu, Volker Tresp, Fei Shen, Yunpu Ma, Tat-Seng Chua
arXiv AI
Jun 30

Beyond Scaling Law: A Data-Efficient Distillation Framework for Reasoning

arXiv:2508. 09883v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable reasoning capabilities in tasks such as algorithmic coding and mathematical problem-solving.

By Xiaojun Wu, Xiaoguang Jiang, Huiyang Li, Jucai Zhai, Dengfeng Liu, Qiaobo Hao, Huang Liu, Zhiguo Yang, Ji Xie, Ninglun Gu, Jin Yang, Kailai Zhang, Yelun Bao, Jun Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Clueing up LLMs with Tool-Augmented Deductive Reasoning

The paper introduces a text-based, multi-agent version of the board game Clue to test multi-step deductive reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Six LLM-based agents (GPT‑4o‑mini and Gemini‑2.5‑Flash) play turn‑based games, and a tool‑augmented approach uses a structured possibility matrix to convert implicit game state into explicit remaining possibilities, thereby offloading memory and deductive constraints from the agents. The study compares this tool‑augmented method against a baseline to assess its impact on reasoning quality and task success in a strategic reasoning environment.

By Rebecca Ansell, Autumn Toney-Wails
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 4

ReflectRL: Learning from Golden Negative Trajectories via Reflective-to-Direct Reasoning

On-policy training has emerged as a powerful post-training paradigm for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models, and is often enhanced by golden trajectories from stronger expert models. However, when the expert fails on harder problems, existing trajectory-guided methods lose their main source of supervision, and these failed trajectories are typically discarded as negative samples.