arXiv AI By Luca Zhou, Sajel Shah, Emanuele Rodol\`a, Roberto Dess\`i

Hard or Just Unreached? Diagnosing the Sampling Blind Spot in Math-Reasoning Difficulty Estimation

Read the original on arXiv AI →

arXiv:2606. 19636v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Math and science reasoning benchmarks rely on pass@k, the fraction of sampled chains that reach gold, as the canonical per-example difficulty signal.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

It's the Problem, Not the Path: Budget and Difficulty Confounds in LLM Reasoning Trajectories

The paper investigates whether large language models’ reasoning traces truly contain early, informative signals or merely reflect budget and difficulty confounds. Using a restart‑controlled truncation probe, the authors compare continuation success rates against from‑scratch restart curves across 178 problem‑model pairs, finding that only one case shows prefix‑limited success and that continuing a model’s own prefix generally outperforms restarting. A difficulty‑controlled test and two generation‑free analyses reveal that early internal signals do not carry outcome information beyond a problem‑difficulty baseline, underscoring the need for proper counterfactual controls.

By Yigit Utku Bulut
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 13

The Equilibrium Is the Initialization: Lazy Identity Collapse in Physics-Structured Deep Equilibrium Reasoning

Deep equilibrium models promise input-adaptive implicit computation: harder problems should demand more solver iterations, and the solved equilibrium should encode the result of genuine iterative inference. We report a cautionary study of a port-Hamiltonian DEQ with a learned initialization on two reasoning tasks -- ProofWriter entailment over frozen DeBERTa embeddings and a BFS-verified graph-reachability benchmark -- in which the implicit computation is a silent no-op.