arXiv:2608. 09942v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: It is widely assumed that chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting universally improves LLM reasoning.
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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....
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.
Nexus introduces a depth‑adaptive KV‑cache splicing and retrieval‑decoupled tool routing mechanism for agentic large language models that reduces the time‑to‑first‑token (TTFT) by decoupling tool routing from the expensive schema re‑encoding step. It uses an INT8 semantic lookaside buffer to select tools via retrieval and generates arguments from a compressed textual signature, maintaining about 89% routing accuracy even as the tool registry scales to 250 tools. Additionally, Nexus can splice compiled schema KV blocks into the live context, repairing the seam with a depth‑adaptive suffix redecode when rotary position embedding drift exceeds a threshold, ensuring output fidelity while achieving up to 1.7× TTFT speedup at moderate depth.
APEX-EM is a non‑parametric experience memory that stores full procedural‑episodic traces in a typed Procedural Knowledge Graph and retrieves them via semantic search, structural‑signature matching, and graph traversal. It uses a Plan‑Retrieve‑Generate‑Iterate‑Ingest workflow to produce, quality‑gate, and commit experiences, indexing both successes and failures so the agent learns what to reuse and what to avoid. Evaluations on five benchmarks with a shared GPT‑4o backbone show significant performance gains, such as +7.6 pp on BigCodeBench transfer and +1.4 pp on Lifelong Agent Bench, demonstrating that the memory adds to model capability rather than replacing it.
The paper demonstrates that greedy decoding from large language models is not precision‑invariant: the same model, prompt, and decoding algorithm can produce different outputs when run in BF16 versus FP16 on identical hardware. Across six models (1.1B–7B parameters, four families, and 12B) and three benchmarks, 49–100 % of prompts diverge, with a single token flip often cascading into trajectory‑level divergence. The authors develop an empirical error‑propagation analysis that identifies the top‑two logit margin at the LM head as the key factor, and they propose a low‑overhead intervention—selective FP32 LM head recomputation—that improves exact agreement by 22–36 percentage points with less than 4 % latency overhead. "whyItMatters":"The findings reveal that precision choices can fundamentally alter model outputs, challenging the assumption of deterministic greedy decoding and highlighting the need for precision‑aware inference strategies."
arXiv:2608. 01575v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whether large language models perform genuine algorithmic reasoning or mere pattern completion is hard to test, because most benchmarks lack a ground truth for correct inductive inference.