The paper introduces Thinking-Free Policy Initialization (TFPI), a simple adaptation to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Reward (RLVR) that removes explicit thinking content during training and inference. TFPI bridges long Chain-of-Thought distillation with standard RLVR, reducing token usage and improving performance. Experiments show that TFPI accelerates RL convergence, raises performance ceilings, and yields token‑efficient reasoning models, enabling a 4B model to achieve 89.0% accuracy on AIME24 and 65.5% on LiveCodeBench with under 4K H20 hours.
By Xin Xu, Clive Bai, Kai Yang, Tianhao Chen, Yang Wang, Saiyong Yang, Can Yang
When2Think introduces a post‑training framework that dynamically allocates reasoning depth in Large Reasoning Models based on instance difficulty. The method uses Instance‑level Difficulty‑Aware Control (IDAC) to shape rewards with pre‑computed accuracy and token usage statistics, enabling stable, critic‑free optimization without learned reward models. Experiments on mathematical benchmarks show that When2Think improves accuracy‑efficiency trade‑offs, achieving higher Pass@3 scores while reducing token usage compared to baseline models.
By Jaejun Shim, HyunJin Kim, Young Jin Kim, JinYeong Bak
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.
By Zhishuai Liu, Xingzi Xu, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Pan Xu, Karim Bouyarmane
arXiv:2606. 07950v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: RL with verifiable rewards can substantially improve LLM reasoning, yet standard GRPO-style training often treats easy, hard, and learnable questions alike through uniform sampling and weighting, leading to inefficient compute allocation.
By Zhanke Zhou, Xiangyu Lu, Chentao Cao, Brando Miranda, Tongliang Liu, Bo Han, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv:2605.06165v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: As the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) accelerates, token consumption from intermediate reasoning traces increasingly contribut...
By Richmond Sin Jing Xuan, Rishabh Bhardwaj, Soujanya Poria
arXiv:2609.37304v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large reasoning models improve performance on challenging problems by allocating additional computation before answering, but longer reasoning does not...
By Zhibin Wen, Tao Han, Lei Bai, Can Li, Yang Xu