arXiv:2607. 25675v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Text-space optimization adapts large language models (LLMs) by editing external natural-language artifacts rather than model weights, so the optimized artifacts remain inspectable and the model can be treated as a black box.
By Jiangwang Chen, Zixin Song, Junlin Liu, Shuaiyu Zhou, Haiyan Wu, Haihan Shi, Chenxi Zhou, Hanqing Li, Xiao Yang, Da Zhu, Guanjun Jiang, Hai Wan, Xibin Zhao
WordPolo is a word‑finding task that evaluates language models by having them guess an unknown target word and receive semantic similarity feedback. Participants start with no knowledge, make iterative guesses, and receive distance scores that guide them through semantic space. The study tests recent LLMs, LRMs, humans, and a heuristic on 1,500 puzzles, revealing that while solve rates vary widely, many models make meaningful progress and exhibit human‑like strategies, highlighting the importance of assessing reasoning processes, not just final accuracy.
By Tyler McDonald, Ali Emami
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:2510. 09595v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Competitive programming problems are increasingly used to evaluate the coding capabilities of large language models (LLMs) due to their complexity and ease of verification.
By Kaijian Zou, Aaron Xiong, Yunxiang Zhang, Frederick Zhang, Yueqi Ren, Jirong Yang, Ayoung Lee, Shitanshu Bhushan, Lu Wang
arXiv:2606. 01667v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling has become a major way to improve large language model reasoning, but its orchestration has remained designer-engineered: a fixed sample budget, a fixed refinement loop, a fixed scoring rule, or a fixed search policy decides how compute is spent, leaving the model in charge of solving but not of orchestration.
By Peijia Qin, Qi Cao, Pengtao Xie
The paper investigates how test‑time computation can enhance language models and at what cost, introducing the SELF‑POT benchmark to evaluate this across competition mathematics, competitive programming, and agentic workflows. SELF‑POT separates candidate coverage from final accuracy, tracks correctness transitions under revision, and measures protocol completion alongside task success. Using a unified budget rule, the study compares direct inference, parallel sampling, and self‑revision across five low‑cost reasoning models, revealing that selection rules and failure handling significantly influence gains and cost savings.
By Bangji Yang, Jingyuan Li, Jiajun Fan, Yi Evie Zhang, Ruihan Guo, Hongba Ma, Neil He, Chumeng Liang, Qinglong Zheng, Zhanghan Ni, Ge Liu