arXiv AI
Sep 28

Nice Fold or Hero Call: Learning Budget-Efficient Thinking under Policy-Dependent Solvability

The paper introduces Budget‑Efficient Thinking (BET), a two‑stage framework that treats adaptive reasoning as a computational investment, aligning solve‑or‑fold decisions with expected return rather than perceived difficulty. BET learns three distinct behaviors: concise short solves for easy queries, early abstention (nice fold) when further reasoning is unlikely to pay off, and allocating sufficient compute (hero call) for hard‑but‑solvable questions. Experiments on seven benchmarks with three base models show BET cuts reasoning tokens by 54% while boosting accuracy by up to 3.2%, and it transfers effectively to scientific QA and logical reasoning tasks.

By Zhaomeng Zhou, Lan Zhang, Junyang Wang, Mu Yuan, Songlin Liu, Tingzhao Li, Yiqing Hu, Yumeng Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 19

Thinking in a Low-Resource Language: What SFT Builds, What RL Fixes, What Accuracy Cannot See

The paper evaluates how three large mixture‑of‑experts models (Alibaba, OpenAI, NVIDIA) can be fine‑tuned to reason in a low‑resource language, specifically Greek. Accuracy metrics show little change, but the authors uncover significant qualitative improvements: after supervised fine‑tuning, models reason in Greek on ~98% of items, with better grammaticality and retained general ability. Reinforcement learning with pre‑registered rewards further eliminates reasoning‑channel leaks and format skips, while the Greek‑reasoning habit remains robust to an accuracy‑only gradient.

By Ayoub Kirouane, Christos Petrocheilos
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Bongard: Training Machine Intuition

arXiv:2609.39111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human intelligence relies heavily on learned intuition: recognising patterns and judging situations without explicitly unfolding every intermediate ste...

By Li Ding, Haidi Jin, Chen Ji
arXiv Computation and Language
23h ago

Readout Stability in Prefill-Only Decision Models:Zero-Label Prediction and Inference-Time Compute Allocation

Prefill‑only decision models evaluate every candidate in a menu in a single forward pass, avoiding decoding and reducing cost by one to two orders of magnitude compared to generative language models. The paper demonstrates that when only the candidate menu changes, the model’s post‑intervention accuracy can be predicted solely from the cached first‑pass distribution using a simple estimator that renormalizes and selects the argmax, without any labels or second pass. Across seven model families, ten datasets, and two task types, this menu‑only intervention prediction is within 4.2 points of actual accuracy, and in one family it is exact, whereas a probability‑level variant fails by 21 points, indicating the property resides in ranking rather than calibrated probabilities.

By Ran Li, Lei Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

RecurTrace: Adaptive Latent Reasoning with Loop-Time Memory

RecurTrace introduces adaptive latent reasoning for language models by allowing each looped layer to attend to its own past states and by using a halting head to decide when to stop iterating. This approach overcomes two limitations of prior latent recurrence methods: limited access to earlier computations and a fixed loop count that mismatches input difficulty. In experiments on MathQA, RecurTrace achieves 56.9% accuracy with an average of 2.0 loops, outperforming fixed‑depth baselines and other adaptive methods, and it also improves generation accuracy across a range of model sizes.

By Yuxiang Wang, Kunyu Feng, Yingda Shen, Haoning Xu, Junyu Wang, Zhizheng Wu