The paper investigates how different forms of compressed chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning—Explicit, Composed, and Implicit—affect large language model (LLM) performance after supervised fine‑tuning (SFT). Using a synthetic compositional reasoning task, the authors show that coarser CoT requires more SFT data, that Composed and Implicit CoT benefit more from data scaling (with Composed also benefiting from repetition), and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can decompose compressed steps learned during SFT. Additionally, unidirectional CoT ordering improves generalization on longer sequential tasks.
By Kohsei Matsutani, Gouki Minegishi, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
The paper proposes Layer-Informed Fine-Tuning (LIFT), a method that identifies and updates only the most functionally critical layers of large language models (LLMs) using a bottleneck identification mechanism based on sensitivity analysis. By focusing on layers that handle conceptualization, reasoning, and textualization, LIFT aims to accelerate training and enhance performance on reasoning tasks. Experiments demonstrate that this selective fine-tuning approach both speeds up the training process and yields significant performance gains.
By Junning Shao, Siwei Wang, Zhixuan Fang
arXiv:2509. 04027v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time scaling, primarily manifested through multi-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (RL), has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Zeyu Gan, Hao Yi, Yong Liu
arXiv:2509. 04027v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Test-time scaling, primarily manifested through multi-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning via Reinforcement Learning (RL), has emerged as a pivotal paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs).
By Zeyu Gan, Hao Yi, Yong Liu
arXiv:2608. 08113v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has become the dominant paradigm for eliciting reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs), yet it creates substantial computational overhead by forcing models to externalize intermediate reasoning steps as discrete tokens.
By Abhishek Panwar, Maheep Singh, Saksham Bansal
arXiv:2603.21676v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Standard Transformers have a fixed computational depth, limiting their ability to generalize to tasks that require variable-depth reasoning....
By Hung-Hsuan Chen