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
arXiv:2609.37066v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Post-training is central to mathematical reasoning in modern large language models (LLMs), but endpoint pass@1 alone underidentifies what has changed...
By Hongyang Li, Yiming Zhu, Xiao Li, Caesar Wu, Said Mammar, Pascal Bouvry
arXiv:2607. 11116v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.
By Joyjeet Singh
arXiv:2608. 15445v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: When a reward is correct on every training example yet consistent with more than one goal, a model can acquire an unintended one, a failure known as goal misgeneralization.
By Suyash Maniyar, Armaan Sandhu, Abhishek Mishra
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.
arXiv:2607. 20543v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can improve one-sample accuracy while making a model worse under repeated sampling.
By Todd Zhou