The paper argues that large language models (LLMs) organize their internal mathematical reasoning by reusable reasoning approaches rather than by the benchmark topics they are tested on. Using a generation‑replay protocol, the authors extract activation‑importance signatures from eight models across five math sources, cluster these signatures, and find that the resulting groups align more closely with reasoning approaches than with topics. The study shows that changing the requested reasoning approach shifts cluster assignments, while paraphrasing the prompt does not, underscoring the primacy of approach over topic in LLM reasoning.
By Sajad Goudarzi, Samaneh Zamanifard, Moloud Nasiri, Hamed Rahimian
arXiv:2605.30327v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Frontier reasoning models are produced by post-training base language models with reinforcement learning. Recent work has challenged this by...
By Felix Zhou, Anay Mehrotra, Quanquan C. Liu
arXiv:2606. 01682v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths.
By Atoosa Chegini, Soheil Feizi
Selecting the best response from multiple small-model samples using a stronger scorer is a simple inference-time strategy, but fails when the small model has already committed to incorrect reasoning paths. PRM guided search avoids this by scoring candidate continuations during generation, but requires a reward model trained with step-level labels.
The paper introduces Trimmed Logit-Gap SFT (TrimSFT), a token-level reweighting strategy that adjusts supervised fine-tuning loss based on the logit gap between the correct token and its strongest competitor. TrimSFT trims supervision from tokens that are either already mastered (large logit gap) or poorly supported (small or negative logit gap), focusing learning on tokens with intermediate logit gaps. Experiments on six base models across five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that TrimSFT consistently outperforms standard SFT, achieving the best average performance on five of six models and up to +26.9 points on MATH500.
By Yaning Jia, Chunhui Zhang, Wenxuan Xu, Xingjian Diao, Xiaoyuan Wang, Soroush Vosoughi
The paper introduces GAP, a methodology that automatically generates mathematically equivalent variants of existing math problems using surface renames and kernel rewrites. Applying GAP to all 1,051 William Lowell Putnam Competition problems creates PutnamGAP, a 6,306-item dataset with 5,255 unseen variants. Evaluation of 18 commercial and open-source LLMs shows accuracy drops across all models, especially under kernel rewrites, indicating a persistent weakness in transferring proof plans to new mathematical settings.
By Yuren Hao, Xiang Wan, ChengXiang Zhai