Sharpen Without Search: On-Policy Distillation of Sequence-Level Power Distribution

On-policy power distillation trains models to generate sharpened answers directly, improving single-sample math reasoning by up to 27.3 points and outperforming multi-candidate sampling and reward-based methods.

Erfan Baghaei Potraghloo, Seyedarmin Azizi, Arya Fayyazi, Saeid Shokoufa and 3 more

Published Oct 5, 2026 · ▲ 4 on Hugging Face · Code ★ 1

Base Models Can Reason By Taking a Cue From Training Data

Fixing initial token cues in base models boosts reasoning to match RL performance, with effects traced to training data associations that can be causally edited.

Sophie L. Wang, Amil Dravid, Rulin Shao, Kevin Farhat and 2 more

Published Oct 5, 2026 · ▲ 12 on Hugging Face · Code ★ 2

What Matters for Latent Reasoning with Flow Matching

FLaRe uses flow matching for latent reasoning that is useful, diverse, explainable, refinable and efficient, reaching 97% of explicit chain-of-thought accuracy at 25% latency.

Yassine Ouali, Adrian Bulat, Georgios Tzimiropoulos

Published Oct 5, 2026 · ▲ 10 on Hugging Face

Efficient Reasoning Training Does Not Always Harm CoT Faithfulness and Monitorability

Efficient reasoning training differs in impact: faithfulness usually drops due to inconsistency, but monitorability remains robust.

Samuel Lewis-Lim, Xingwei Tan, Mario Sänger, Zhixue Zhao and 1 more

Published Oct 2, 2026 · 0 citations · ▲ 13 on Hugging Face

Language Models that Play Chess and Explain Their Moves

Queen, a 4B-parameter chess-language model, plays at grandmaster level and explains moves via cross-attention to a silent expert encoder and iterative Bellman-style explanation distillation, surpassing larger frontier models.

Adithya Bhaskar, Jeffrey Cheng, Danqi Chen

Published Oct 2, 2026 · 0 citations · ▲ 31 on Hugging Face · Code ★ 18

Hierarchical Continuous Diffusion Language Models

HC-DLM couples discrete token generation with a continuous latent trajectory via a unified variational denoising objective, outperforming diffusion baselines on Sudoku, Countdown, and language modeling.

Hui Ren, Zihan Li, Chang Liu, Huidong Liu and 1 more

Published Oct 1, 2026 · 0 citations · ▲ 89 on Hugging Face · Code ★ 57

Counting Moves, Weighing Voices: Bayesian Dialectical Argumentation for Calibrated Multi-LLM Councils under Persistent Adversaries

BDA treats multi-LLM council moves as observations of a per-agent reliability model to yield calibrated answer probabilities and robustly handle persistent adversaries without extra LLM calls.

Ionel Eduard Stan, Paolo Napoletano

Published Oct 1, 2026 · 0 citations

Does Learning Protein Folding Generalize to Broader Reasoning?

Post-training on protein-folding data via discrete answers and continuous geometry improves structure prediction and broad reasoning across ten benchmarks.

Yong Liu, Zhanpeng Shi, Yizhou Dang, Zhongyue Zhang and 3 more

Published Sep 30, 2026 · 0 citations · ▲ 120 on Hugging Face · Code ★ 28

Interpolated Policy Distillation: A Controllable Continuum Between Off-Policy and On-Policy Distillation

Interpolated Policy Distillation mixes student and teacher token distributions to balance trajectory quality and learnability, outperforming off-policy and on-policy distillation across reasoning benchmarks.

Youxu Shi, Yifan Sun, Dacheng Yin, Haomiao Tang and 4 more

Published Sep 29, 2026 · 0 citations

TeacherGRPO: Closing the Capacity Gap in Reasoning Distillation via Teacher Alignment

TeacherGRPO aligns teachers to student distributions via reinforcement learning to overcome reasoning distillation's Gap Curse and improves student performance.

Zhenyu Lei, Zihan Chen, Yaochen Zhu, Shangbin Feng and 4 more

Published Aug 20, 2026 · 0 citations

On the Geometry of On-Policy Distillation

On-policy distillation updates occupy a sparse, low-dimensional parameter subspace that is functionally sufficient and geometrically distinct from supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning.

Zhennan Shen, Yanshu Li, Qingyu Yin, Chak Tou Leong and 5 more

Published Jun 5, 2026 · 0 citations · ▲ 75 on Hugging Face

RelayLLM: Efficient Reasoning via Collaborative Decoding

RelayLLM enables small language models to dynamically invoke large models for critical reasoning tokens via collaborative decoding, reducing costs by 98.2% while achieving 49.52% accuracy.

Chengsong Huang, Tong Zheng, Langlin Huang, Jinyuan Li and 2 more

Published Jan 8, 2026 · 0 citations · ▲ 30 on Hugging Face · Code ★ 41

DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open Large Language Models

DeepSeek-V3.2 improves efficiency via sparse attention, scaled reinforcement learning matching GPT-5, and agentic synthesis, with a special variant surpassing GPT-5 and reaching gold-medal IMO and IOI levels.

DeepSeek-AI, Aixin Liu, Mei, Aoxue, Lin, Bangcai and 36 more

Published Dec 2, 2025 · 8 citations · ▲ 274 on Hugging Face

SoftCoT: Soft Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Reasoning with LLMs

SoftCoT uses a fixed assistant and projection module to generate soft reasoning tokens that boost LLM reasoning via parameter-efficient fine-tuning.

Yaogeng Xu, Xu Guo, Zhiwei Zeng, Chunyan Miao

Published 2025 · 14 citations

Continuous Audio Thinking for Large Audio Language Models

Gyojin Han, DongJae Lee, Changho Choi, Jongsuk Kim and 1 more

Sydney Poster Session 6, Thu, Dec 10, 5:00 PM–8:00 PM, Hall 1-4 · Published 2026

Hypothesis generation and updating in large language models

Huadong Xiong

Atlanta Poster Session 2, Wed, Dec 9, 4:30 PM–7:30 PM, Hall C1 · Published 2026

Reasoning with Sampling: Cutting at Decision Points

Felix Zhou, Anay Mehrotra, Quanquan C Liu

Atlanta Poster Session 3, Thu, Dec 10, 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, Hall C1 · Published 2026

A Solvable Model of Chain-of-Thought in In-Context Learning

Kaito Takanami, Cengiz Pehlevan

Sydney Poster Session 1, Tue, Dec 8, 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, Hall 1-4 · Published 2026

Contractive Restoring Flows: Robust Reasoning Distillation via Orbital Stability

Dongqi Zuo, Yuanyuan Wang, Chuan Zhou, Haoxuan Li and 1 more

Sydney Poster Session 5, Thu, Dec 10, 10:00 AM–1:00 PM, Hall 1-4 · Published 2026

Programmatic Reasoning with Structural Schema: A Unified Framework for Multi-Table Inference

Jialin Chen, Brandon Mayer, Michael Galkin, Sami Abu-El-Haija and 2 more

Sydney Poster Session 4, Wed, Dec 9, 5:00 PM–8:00 PM, Hall 1-4 · Published 2026