Daily Papers

As large vision-language models (LVLMs) evolve rapidly, the demand for high-quality and diverse data to align these models becomes increasingly crucial. However, the creation of such data with human supervision proves costly and time-intensive. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of AI feedback to scale supervision for aligning LVLMs. We introduce VLFeedback, the first large-scale vision-language feedback dataset, comprising over 82K multi-modal instructions and comprehensive rationales generated by off-the-shelf models without human annotations. To evaluate the effectiveness of AI feedback for vision-language alignment, we train Silkie, an LVLM fine-tuned via direct preference optimization on VLFeedback. Silkie showcases exceptional performance regarding helpfulness, visual faithfulness, and safety metrics. It outperforms its base model by 6.9\% and 9.5\% in perception and cognition tasks, reduces hallucination issues on MMHal-Bench, and exhibits enhanced resilience against red-teaming attacks. Furthermore, our analysis underscores the advantage of AI feedback, particularly in fostering preference diversity to deliver more comprehensive improvements. Our dataset, training code and models are available at https://vlf-silkie.github.io.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback plays a crucial role in aligning language models towards human preferences, traditionally represented through comparisons between pairs or sets of responses within a given context. While many studies have enhanced algorithmic techniques to optimize learning from such data, this work shifts focus to improving preference learning through a data-centric approach. Specifically, we propose enriching existing preference datasets with machine-generated rationales that explain the reasons behind choices. We develop a simple and principled framework to augment current preference learning methods with rationale information. Our comprehensive analysis highlights how rationales enhance learning efficiency. Extensive experiments reveal that rationale-enriched preference learning offers multiple advantages: it improves data efficiency, accelerates convergence to higher-performing models, and reduces verbosity bias and hallucination. Furthermore, this framework is versatile enough to integrate with various preference optimization algorithms. Overall, our findings highlight the potential of re-imagining data design for preference learning, demonstrating that even freely available machine-generated rationales can significantly boost performance across multiple dimensions. The code repository is available at https: //github.com/reds-lab/preference-learning-with-rationales

Aligned large language models (LLMs) demonstrate exceptional capabilities in task-solving, following instructions, and ensuring safety. However, the continual learning aspect of these aligned LLMs has been largely overlooked. Existing continual learning benchmarks lack sufficient challenge for leading aligned LLMs, owing to both their simplicity and the models' potential exposure during instruction tuning. In this paper, we introduce TRACE, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in LLMs. TRACE consists of 8 distinct datasets spanning challenging tasks including domain-specific tasks, multilingual capabilities, code generation, and mathematical reasoning. All datasets are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Our experiments show that after training on TRACE, aligned LLMs exhibit significant declines in both general ability and instruction-following capabilities. For example, the accuracy of llama2-chat 13B on gsm8k dataset declined precipitously from 28.8\% to 2\% after training on our datasets. This highlights the challenge of finding a suitable tradeoff between achieving performance on specific tasks while preserving the original prowess of LLMs. Empirical findings suggest that tasks inherently equipped with reasoning paths contribute significantly to preserving certain capabilities of LLMs against potential declines. Motivated by this, we introduce the Reasoning-augmented Continual Learning (RCL) approach. RCL integrates task-specific cues with meta-rationales, effectively reducing catastrophic forgetting in LLMs while expediting convergence on novel tasks.

Although social media platforms are a prominent arena for users to engage in interpersonal discussions and express opinions, the facade and anonymity offered by social media may allow users to spew hate speech and offensive content. Given the massive scale of such platforms, there arises a need to automatically identify and flag instances of hate speech. Although several hate speech detection methods exist, most of these black-box methods are not interpretable or explainable by design. To address the lack of interpretability, in this paper, we propose to use state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract features in the form of rationales from the input text, to train a base hate speech classifier, thereby enabling faithful interpretability by design. Our framework effectively combines the textual understanding capabilities of LLMs and the discriminative power of state-of-the-art hate speech classifiers to make these classifiers faithfully interpretable. Our comprehensive evaluation on a variety of social media hate speech datasets demonstrate: (1) the goodness of the LLM-extracted rationales, and (2) the surprising retention of detector performance even after training to ensure interpretability.

This paper strives to solve complex video question answering (VideoQA) which features long video containing multiple objects and events at different time. To tackle the challenge, we highlight the importance of identifying question-critical temporal moments and spatial objects from the vast amount of video content. Towards this, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Rationalization (STR), a differentiable selection module that adaptively collects question-critical moments and objects using cross-modal interaction. The discovered video moments and objects are then served as grounded rationales to support answer reasoning. Based on STR, we further propose TranSTR, a Transformer-style neural network architecture that takes STR as the core and additionally underscores a novel answer interaction mechanism to coordinate STR for answer decoding. Experiments on four datasets show that TranSTR achieves new state-of-the-art (SoTA). Especially, on NExT-QA and Causal-VidQA which feature complex VideoQA, it significantly surpasses the previous SoTA by 5.8\% and 6.8\%, respectively. We then conduct extensive studies to verify the importance of STR as well as the proposed answer interaction mechanism. With the success of TranSTR and our comprehensive analysis, we hope this work can spark more future efforts in complex VideoQA. Code will be released at https://github.com/yl3800/TranSTR.

The emergence of multimodal large models (MLMs) has significantly advanced the field of visual understanding, offering remarkable capabilities in the realm of visual question answering (VQA). Yet, the true challenge lies in the domain of knowledge-intensive VQA tasks, which necessitate not just recognition of visual elements, but also a deep comprehension of the visual information in conjunction with a vast repository of learned knowledge. To uncover such capabilities of MLMs, particularly the newly introduced GPT-4V and Gemini, we provide an in-depth evaluation from three perspectives: 1) Commonsense Knowledge, which assesses how well models can understand visual cues and connect to general knowledge; 2) Fine-grained World Knowledge, which tests the model's skill in reasoning out specific knowledge from images, showcasing their proficiency across various specialized fields; 3) Comprehensive Knowledge with Decision-making Rationales, which examines model's capability to provide logical explanations for its inference, facilitating a deeper analysis from the interpretability perspective. Additionally, we utilize a visual knowledge-enhanced training strategy and multimodal retrieval-augmented generation approach to enhance MLMs, highlighting the future need for advancements in this research direction. Extensive experiments indicate that: a) GPT-4V demonstrates enhanced explanation generation when using composite images as few-shots; b) GPT-4V and other MLMs produce severe hallucinations when dealing with world knowledge; c) Visual knowledge enhanced training and prompting technicals present potential to improve performance. Codes: https://github.com/HITsz-TMG/Cognitive-Visual-Language-Mapper

Large language models (LLMs) face challenges in solving complex mathematical problems that require comprehensive capacities to parse the statements, associate domain knowledge, perform compound logical reasoning, and integrate the intermediate rationales. Tackling all these problems once could be arduous for LLMs, thus leading to confusion in generation. In this work, we explore the potential of enhancing LLMs with agents by meticulous decomposition and modeling of mathematical reasoning process. Specifically, we propose a formal description of the mathematical solving and extend LLMs with an agent-based zero-shot framework named Planner-Reasoner-Executor-Reflector (PRER). We further provide and implement two MathAgents that define the logical forms and inherent relations via a pool of actions in different grains and orientations: MathAgent-M adapts its actions to LLMs, while MathAgent-H aligns with humankind. Experiments on miniF2F and MATH have demonstrated the effectiveness of PRER and proposed MathAgents, achieving an increase of 12.3%(53.9%66.2%) on the MiniF2F, 9.2% (49.8%59.0%) on MATH, and 13.2%(23.2%35.4%) for level-5 problems of MATH against GPT-4. Further analytical results provide more insightful perspectives on exploiting the behaviors of LLMs as agents.

As large language models (LLMs) grow larger and more sophisticated, assessing their "reasoning" capabilities in natural language grows more challenging. Recent question answering (QA) benchmarks that attempt to assess reasoning are often limited by a narrow scope of covered situations and subject matters. We introduce WikiWhy, a QA dataset built around a novel auxiliary task: explaining why an answer is true in natural language. WikiWhy contains over 9,000 "why" question-answer-rationale triples, grounded on Wikipedia facts across a diverse set of topics. Each rationale is a set of supporting statements connecting the question to the answer. WikiWhy serves as a benchmark for the reasoning capabilities of LLMs because it demands rigorous explicit rationales for each answer to demonstrate the acquisition of implicit commonsense knowledge, which is unlikely to be easily memorized. GPT-3 baselines achieve only 38.7% human-evaluated correctness in the end-to-end answer & explain condition, leaving significant room for future improvements.

We present VISPROG, a neuro-symbolic approach to solving complex and compositional visual tasks given natural language instructions. VISPROG avoids the need for any task-specific training. Instead, it uses the in-context learning ability of large language models to generate python-like modular programs, which are then executed to get both the solution and a comprehensive and interpretable rationale. Each line of the generated program may invoke one of several off-the-shelf computer vision models, image processing routines, or python functions to produce intermediate outputs that may be consumed by subsequent parts of the program. We demonstrate the flexibility of VISPROG on 4 diverse tasks - compositional visual question answering, zero-shot reasoning on image pairs, factual knowledge object tagging, and language-guided image editing. We believe neuro-symbolic approaches like VISPROG are an exciting avenue to easily and effectively expand the scope of AI systems to serve the long tail of complex tasks that people may wish to perform.

Multimodal reasoning is a challenging task that requires models to reason across multiple modalities to answer questions. Existing approaches have made progress by incorporating language and visual modalities into a two-stage reasoning framework, separating rationale generation from answer inference. However, these approaches often fall short due to the inadequate quality of the generated rationales. In this work, we delve into the importance of rationales in model reasoning. We observe that when rationales are completely accurate, the model's accuracy significantly improves, highlighting the need for high-quality rationale generation. Motivated by this, we propose MC-CoT, a self-consistency training strategy that generates multiple rationales and answers, subsequently selecting the most accurate through a voting process. This approach not only enhances the quality of generated rationales but also leads to more accurate and robust answers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves model performance across various benchmarks. Remarkably, we show that even smaller base models, when equipped with our proposed approach, can achieve results comparable to those of larger models, illustrating the potential of our approach in harnessing the power of rationales for improved multimodal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/chengtan9907/mc-cot.

Sequence models are a critical component of modern NLP systems, but their predictions are difficult to explain. We consider model explanations though rationales, subsets of context that can explain individual model predictions. We find sequential rationales by solving a combinatorial optimization: the best rationale is the smallest subset of input tokens that would predict the same output as the full sequence. Enumerating all subsets is intractable, so we propose an efficient greedy algorithm to approximate this objective. The algorithm, which is called greedy rationalization, applies to any model. For this approach to be effective, the model should form compatible conditional distributions when making predictions on incomplete subsets of the context. This condition can be enforced with a short fine-tuning step. We study greedy rationalization on language modeling and machine translation. Compared to existing baselines, greedy rationalization is best at optimizing the combinatorial objective and provides the most faithful rationales. On a new dataset of annotated sequential rationales, greedy rationales are most similar to human rationales.

Interpretability or explainability is an emerging research field in NLP. From a user-centric point of view, the goal is to build models that provide proper justification for their decisions, similar to those of humans, by requiring the models to satisfy additional constraints. To this end, we introduce a new application on legal text where, contrary to mainstream literature targeting word-level rationales, we conceive rationales as selected paragraphs in multi-paragraph structured court cases. We also release a new dataset comprising European Court of Human Rights cases, including annotations for paragraph-level rationales. We use this dataset to study the effect of already proposed rationale constraints, i.e., sparsity, continuity, and comprehensiveness, formulated as regularizers. Our findings indicate that some of these constraints are not beneficial in paragraph-level rationale extraction, while others need re-formulation to better handle the multi-label nature of the task we consider. We also introduce a new constraint, singularity, which further improves the quality of rationales, even compared with noisy rationale supervision. Experimental results indicate that the newly introduced task is very challenging and there is a large scope for further research.

Training on large amounts of rationales (i.e., CoT Fine-tuning) is effective at improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, acquiring human-authored rationales or augmenting rationales from proprietary models is costly and not scalable. In this paper, we study the problem of whether LLMs could self-improve their reasoning capabilities. To this end, we propose Self-Explore, where the LLM is tasked to explore the first wrong step (i.e., the first pit) within the rationale and use such signals as fine-grained rewards for further improvement. On the GSM8K and MATH test set, Self-Explore achieves 11.57% and 2.89% improvement on average across three LLMs compared to supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Our code is available at https://github.com/hbin0701/Self-Explore.

Large-scale high-quality training data is important for improving the performance of models. After trained with data that has rationales (reasoning steps), models gain reasoning capability. However, the dataset with high-quality rationales is relatively scarce due to the high annotation cost. To address this issue, we propose Self-motivated Learning framework. The framework motivates the model itself to automatically generate rationales on existing datasets. Based on the inherent rank from correctness across multiple rationales, the model learns to generate better rationales, leading to higher reasoning capability. Specifically, we train a reward model with the rank to evaluate the quality of rationales, and improve the performance of reasoning through reinforcement learning. Experiment results of Llama2 7B on multiple reasoning datasets show that our method significantly improves the reasoning ability of models, even outperforming text-davinci-002 in some datasets.

The rapid development of large language and vision models (LLVMs) has been driven by advances in visual instruction tuning. Recently, open-source LLVMs have curated high-quality visual instruction tuning datasets and utilized additional vision encoders or multiple computer vision models in order to narrow the performance gap with powerful closed-source LLVMs. These advancements are attributed to multifaceted information required for diverse capabilities, including fundamental image understanding, real-world knowledge about common-sense and non-object concepts (e.g., charts, diagrams, symbols, signs, and math problems), and step-by-step procedures for solving complex questions. Drawing from the multifaceted information, we present a new efficient LLVM, Mamba-based traversal of rationales (Meteor), which leverages multifaceted rationale to enhance understanding and answering capabilities. To embed lengthy rationales containing abundant information, we employ the Mamba architecture, capable of processing sequential data with linear time complexity. We introduce a new concept of traversal of rationale that facilitates efficient embedding of rationale. Subsequently, the backbone multimodal language model (MLM) is trained to generate answers with the aid of rationale. Through these steps, Meteor achieves significant improvements in vision language performances across multiple evaluation benchmarks requiring diverse capabilities, without scaling up the model size or employing additional vision encoders and computer vision models.

Rationality is the quality of being guided by reason, characterized by decision-making that aligns with evidence and logical principles. It plays a crucial role in reliable problem-solving by ensuring well-grounded and consistent solutions. While large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in generating human-like text, they still exhibit limitations such as bounded knowledge space and inconsistent outputs. In response, recent efforts have shifted toward developing multimodal and multi-agent systems, as well as integrating modules like external tools, programming codes, symbolic reasoners, utility function, and conformal risk controls rather than relying solely on a single LLM for decision-making. This paper surveys the state-of-the-art advancements in language and multimodal agents, evaluates how they contribute to make intelligent agents more rational, and identifies open challenges and future research directions. We maintain an open repository at https://github.com/bowen-upenn/Agent_Rationality.

Recent research has shown that rationales, or step-by-step chains of thought, can be used to improve performance in multi-step reasoning tasks. We reconsider rationale-augmented prompting for few-shot in-context learning, where (input -> output) prompts are expanded to (input, rationale -> output) prompts. For rationale-augmented prompting we demonstrate how existing approaches, which rely on manual prompt engineering, are subject to sub-optimal rationales that may harm performance. To mitigate this brittleness, we propose a unified framework of rationale-augmented ensembles, where we identify rationale sampling in the output space as the key component to robustly improve performance. This framework is general and can easily be extended to common natural language processing tasks, even those that do not traditionally leverage intermediate steps, such as question answering, word sense disambiguation, and sentiment analysis. We demonstrate that rationale-augmented ensembles achieve more accurate and interpretable results than existing prompting approaches--including standard prompting without rationales and rationale-based chain-of-thought prompting--while simultaneously improving interpretability of model predictions through the associated rationales.

Medical Visual Question Answering (MedVQA), which offers language responses to image-based medical inquiries, represents a challenging task and significant advancement in healthcare. It assists medical experts to swiftly interpret medical images, thereby enabling faster and more accurate diagnoses. However, the model interpretability and transparency of existing MedVQA solutions are often limited, posing challenges in understanding their decision-making processes. To address this issue, we devise a semi-automated annotation process to streamline data preparation and build new benchmark MedVQA datasets R-RAD, R-SLAKE and R-Path. These datasets provide intermediate medical decision-making rationales generated by multimodal large language models and human annotations for question-answering pairs in existing MedVQA datasets, i.e., VQA-RAD, SLAKE and PathVQA. Moreover, we design a novel framework, MedThink, which finetunes lightweight pretrained generative models by incorporating medical decision-making rationales. MedThink includes three distinct strategies to generate decision outcomes and corresponding rationales, thereby clearly showcasing the medical decision-making process during reasoning. Our comprehensive experiments show that our method achieves an accuracy of 83.5% on R-RAD, 86.3% on R-SLAKE and 87.2% on R-Path. These results significantly exceed those of existing state-of-the-art models with comparable parameters. Datasets and code will be released.

A major issue with using deep learning models in sensitive applications is that they provide no explanation for their output. To address this problem, unsupervised selective rationalization produces rationales alongside predictions by chaining two jointly-trained components, a rationale generator and a predictor. Although this architecture guarantees that the prediction relies solely on the rationale, it does not ensure that the rationale contains a plausible explanation for the prediction. We introduce a novel training technique that effectively limits generation of implausible rationales by injecting noise between the generator and the predictor. Furthermore, we propose a new benchmark for evaluating unsupervised selective rationalization models using movie reviews from existing datasets. We achieve sizeable improvements in rationale plausibility and task accuracy over the state-of-the-art across a variety of tasks, including our new benchmark, while maintaining or improving model faithfulness.

Large language models (LLMs) augmented with external data have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in completing real-world tasks. Techniques for integrating external data into LLMs, such as Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and fine-tuning, are gaining increasing attention and widespread application. Nonetheless, the effective deployment of data-augmented LLMs across various specialized fields presents substantial challenges. These challenges encompass a wide range of issues, from retrieving relevant data and accurately interpreting user intent to fully harnessing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs for complex tasks. We believe that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for data-augmented LLM applications. In practice, underperformance often arises from a failure to correctly identify the core focus of a task or because the task inherently requires a blend of multiple capabilities that must be disentangled for better resolution. In this survey, we propose a RAG task categorization method, classifying user queries into four levels based on the type of external data required and primary focus of the task: explicit fact queries, implicit fact queries, interpretable rationale queries, and hidden rationale queries. We define these levels of queries, provide relevant datasets, and summarize the key challenges and most effective techniques for addressing these challenges. Finally, we discuss three main forms of integrating external data into LLMs: context, small model, and fine-tuning, highlighting their respective strengths, limitations, and the types of problems they are suited to solve. This work aims to help readers thoroughly understand and decompose the data requirements and key bottlenecks in building LLM applications, offering solutions to the different challenges and serving as a guide to systematically developing such applications.

Large language models (LMs) are capable of generating free-text rationales to aid question answering. However, prior work 1) suggests that useful self-rationalization is emergent only at significant scales (e.g., 175B parameter GPT-3); and 2) focuses largely on downstream performance, ignoring the semantics of the rationales themselves, e.g., are they faithful, true, and helpful for humans? In this work, we enable small-scale LMs (approx. 200x smaller than GPT-3) to generate rationales that not only improve downstream task performance, but are also more plausible, consistent, and diverse, assessed both by automatic and human evaluation. Our method, MaRio (Multi-rewArd RatIOnalization), is a multi-reward conditioned self-rationalization algorithm that optimizes multiple distinct properties like plausibility, diversity and consistency. Results on five difficult question-answering datasets StrategyQA, QuaRel, OpenBookQA, NumerSense and QASC show that not only does MaRio improve task accuracy, but it also improves the self-rationalization quality of small LMs across the aforementioned axes better than a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baseline. Extensive human evaluations confirm that MaRio rationales are preferred vs. SFT rationales, as well as qualitative improvements in plausibility and consistency.

In this position paper, we argue that instead of morally aligning LLMs to specific set of ethical principles, we should infuse generic ethical reasoning capabilities into them so that they can handle value pluralism at a global scale. When provided with an ethical policy, an LLM should be capable of making decisions that are ethically consistent to the policy. We develop a framework that integrates moral dilemmas with moral principles pertaining to different foramlisms of normative ethics, and at different levels of abstractions. Initial experiments with GPT-x models shows that while GPT-4 is a nearly perfect ethical reasoner, the models still have bias towards the moral values of Western and English speaking societies.

Free-text rationales justify model decisions in natural language and thus become likable and accessible among approaches to explanation across many tasks. However, their effectiveness can be hindered by misinterpretation and hallucination. As a perturbation test, we investigate how large language models (LLMs) perform rationale generation under the effects of readability level control, i.e., being prompted for an explanation targeting a specific expertise level, such as sixth grade or college. We find that explanations are adaptable to such instruction, though the requested readability is often misaligned with the measured text complexity according to traditional readability metrics. Furthermore, the generated rationales tend to feature medium level complexity, which correlates with the measured quality using automatic metrics. Finally, our human annotators confirm a generally satisfactory impression on rationales at all readability levels, with high-school-level readability being most commonly perceived and favored.

A computational ethics framework is essential for AI and autonomous systems operating in complex, real-world environments. Existing approaches often lack the adaptability needed to integrate ethical principles into dynamic and ambiguous contexts, limiting their effectiveness across diverse scenarios. To address these challenges, we outline the necessary ingredients for building a holistic, meta-level framework that combines intermediate representations, probabilistic reasoning, and knowledge representation. The specifications therein emphasize scalability, supporting ethical reasoning at both individual decision-making levels and within the collective dynamics of multi-agent systems. By integrating theoretical principles with contextual factors, it facilitates structured and context-aware decision-making, ensuring alignment with overarching ethical standards. We further explore proposed theorems outlining how ethical reasoners should operate, offering a foundation for practical implementation. These constructs aim to support the development of robust and ethically reliable AI systems capable of navigating the complexities of real-world moral decision-making scenarios.

Large reasoning models (LRMs) like OpenAI-o1 have demonstrated impressive long stepwise reasoning capabilities through large-scale reinforcement learning. However, their extended reasoning processes often suffer from knowledge insufficiency, leading to frequent uncertainties and potential errors. To address this limitation, we introduce Search-o1, a framework that enhances LRMs with an agentic retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) mechanism and a Reason-in-Documents module for refining retrieved documents. Search-o1 integrates an agentic search workflow into the reasoning process, enabling dynamic retrieval of external knowledge when LRMs encounter uncertain knowledge points. Additionally, due to the verbose nature of retrieved documents, we design a separate Reason-in-Documents module to deeply analyze the retrieved information before injecting it into the reasoning chain, minimizing noise and preserving coherent reasoning flow. Extensive experiments on complex reasoning tasks in science, mathematics, and coding, as well as six open-domain QA benchmarks, demonstrate the strong performance of Search-o1. This approach enhances the trustworthiness and applicability of LRMs in complex reasoning tasks, paving the way for more reliable and versatile intelligent systems. The code is available at https://github.com/sunnynexus/Search-o1.

Eliciting feedback from end users of NLP models can be beneficial for improving models. However, how should we present model responses to users so they are most amenable to be corrected from user feedback? Further, what properties do users value to understand and trust responses? We answer these questions by analyzing the effect of rationales (or explanations) generated by QA models to support their answers. We specifically consider decomposed QA models that first extract an intermediate rationale based on a context and a question and then use solely this rationale to answer the question. A rationale outlines the approach followed by the model to answer the question. Our work considers various formats of these rationales that vary according to well-defined properties of interest. We sample rationales from language models using few-shot prompting for two datasets, and then perform two user studies. First, we present users with incorrect answers and corresponding rationales in various formats and ask them to provide natural language feedback to revise the rationale. We then measure the effectiveness of this feedback in patching these rationales through in-context learning. The second study evaluates how well different rationale formats enable users to understand and trust model answers, when they are correct. We find that rationale formats significantly affect how easy it is (1) for users to give feedback for rationales, and (2) for models to subsequently execute this feedback. In addition, formats with attributions to the context and in-depth reasoning significantly enhance user-reported understanding and trust of model outputs.

Neural language models (LMs) have achieved impressive results on various language-based reasoning tasks by utilizing latent knowledge encoded in their own pretrained parameters. To make this reasoning process more explicit, recent works retrieve a rationalizing LM's internal knowledge by training or prompting it to generate free-text rationales, which can be used to guide task predictions made by either the same LM or a separate reasoning LM. However, rationalizing LMs require expensive rationale annotation and/or computation, without any assurance that their generated rationales improve LM task performance or faithfully reflect LM decision-making. In this paper, we propose PINTO, an LM pipeline that rationalizes via prompt-based learning, and learns to faithfully reason over rationales via counterfactual regularization. First, PINTO maps out a suitable reasoning process for the task input by prompting a frozen rationalizing LM to generate a free-text rationale. Second, PINTO's reasoning LM is fine-tuned to solve the task using the generated rationale as context, while regularized to output less confident predictions when the rationale is perturbed. Across four datasets, we show that PINTO significantly improves the generalization ability of the reasoning LM, yielding higher performance on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution test sets. Also, we find that PINTO's rationales are more faithful to its task predictions than those generated by competitive baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing complex tasks. Moreover, recent research has shown that incorporating human-annotated rationales (e.g., Chain-of-Thought prompting) during in-context learning can significantly enhance the performance of these models, particularly on tasks that require reasoning capabilities. However, incorporating such rationales poses challenges in terms of scalability as this requires a high degree of human involvement. In this work, we present a novel framework, Amplifying Model Performance by Leveraging In-Context Learning with Post Hoc Explanations (AMPLIFY), which addresses the aforementioned challenges by automating the process of rationale generation. To this end, we leverage post hoc explanation methods which output attribution scores (explanations) capturing the influence of each of the input features on model predictions. More specifically, we construct automated natural language rationales that embed insights from post hoc explanations to provide corrective signals to LLMs. Extensive experimentation with real-world datasets demonstrates that our framework, AMPLIFY, leads to prediction accuracy improvements of about 10-25% over a wide range of tasks, including those where prior approaches which rely on human-annotated rationales such as Chain-of-Thought prompting fall short. Our work makes one of the first attempts at highlighting the potential of post hoc explanations as valuable tools for enhancing the effectiveness of LLMs. Furthermore, we conduct additional empirical analyses and ablation studies to demonstrate the impact of each of the components of AMPLIFY, which, in turn, leads to critical insights for refining in-context learning.

Logical reading comprehension is a challenging task that entails grasping the underlying semantics of text and applying reasoning to deduce the correct answer. Prior researches have primarily focused on enhancing logical reasoning capabilities through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) or data augmentation. However, previous work constructing chain-of-thought rationales concentrates solely on analyzing correct options, neglecting the incorrect alternatives. Addtionally, earlier efforts on data augmentation by altering contexts rely on rule-based methods, which result in generated contexts that lack diversity and coherence. To address these issues, we propose a Premise-Oriented Data Augmentation (PODA) framework. This framework can generate CoT rationales including analyses for both correct and incorrect options, while constructing diverse and high-quality counterfactual contexts from incorrect candidate options. We integrate summarizing premises and identifying premises for each option into rationales. Subsequently, we employ multi-step prompts with identified premises to construct counterfactual context. To facilitate the model's capabilities to better differentiate the reasoning process associated with each option, we introduce a novel thought-path contrastive learning method that compares reasoning paths between the original and counterfactual samples. Experimental results on three representative LLMs demonstrate that our method can improve the baselines substantially across two challenging logical reasoning benchmarks (ReClor and LogiQA 2.0). The data and code are released at https://github.com/lalalamdbf/TPReasoner.

Generating rationales that justify scoring decisions has been a promising way to facilitate explainability in automated scoring systems. However, existing methods do not match the accuracy of classifier-based methods. Plus, the generated rationales often contain hallucinated information. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework capable of generating more faithful rationales and, more importantly, matching performance with classifier-based black-box scoring systems. We first mimic the human assessment process by querying Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate a thought tree. We then summarise intermediate assessment decisions from each thought tree path for creating synthetic rationale data and rationale preference data. Finally, we utilise the generated synthetic data to calibrate LLMs through a two-step training process: supervised fine-tuning and preference optimization. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework achieves a 38% assessment performance improvement in the QWK score compared to prior work while producing higher-quality rationales, as recognised by human evaluators and LLMs. Our work sheds light on the effectiveness of performing preference optimization using synthetic preference data obtained from thought tree paths.

When provided with sufficient explanatory context, smaller Language Models have been shown to exhibit strong reasoning ability on challenging short-answer question-answering tasks where the questions are unseen in training. We evaluate two methods for further improvement in this setting. Both methods focus on combining rationales generated by a larger Language Model with longer contexts created from a multi-hop dense retrieval system. The first method (RR) involves training a Rationale Ranking model to score both generated rationales and retrieved contexts with respect to relevance and truthfulness. We then use the scores to derive combined contexts from both knowledge sources using a number of combinatory strategies. For the second method (RATD) we utilise retrieval-augmented training datasets developed by Hartill et al. 2023 to train a smaller Reasoning model such that it becomes proficient at utilising relevant information from longer text sequences that may be only partially evidential and frequently contain many irrelevant sentences. We find that both methods significantly improve results. Our single best Reasoning model materially improves upon strong comparable prior baselines for unseen evaluation datasets (StrategyQA 58.9 rightarrow 61.7 acc., CommonsenseQA 63.6 rightarrow 72.7 acc., ARC-DA 31.6 rightarrow 52.1 F1, IIRC 25.5 rightarrow 27.3 F1) and a version utilising our prior knowledge of each type of question in selecting a context combination strategy does even better. Our proposed models also generally outperform direct prompts against much larger models (BLOOM 175B and StableVicuna 13B) in both few-shot chain-of-thought and standard few-shot settings.

Post-training, particularly reinforcement learning (RL) using self-play-generated data, has become a new learning paradigm for large language models (LLMs). However, scaling RL to develop a general reasoner remains a research challenge, as existing methods focus on task-specific reasoning without adequately addressing generalization across a broader range of tasks. Moreover, unlike traditional RL with limited action space, LLMs operate in an infinite space, making it crucial to search for valuable and diverse strategies to solve problems effectively. To address this, we propose searching within the action space on high-level abstract plans to enhance model generalization and introduce Critical Plan Step Learning (CPL), comprising: 1) searching on plan, using Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to explore diverse plan steps in multi-step reasoning tasks, and 2) learning critical plan steps through Step-level Advantage Preference Optimization (Step-APO), which integrates advantage estimates for step preference obtained via MCTS into Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). This combination helps the model effectively learn critical plan steps, enhancing both reasoning capabilities and generalization. Experimental results demonstrate that our method, trained exclusively on GSM8K and MATH, not only significantly improves performance on GSM8K (+10.5%) and MATH (+6.5%), but also enhances out-of-domain reasoning benchmarks, such as HumanEval (+12.2%), GPQA (+8.6%), ARC-C (+4.0%), MMLU-STEM (+2.2%), and BBH (+1.8%).

Generating step-by-step "chain-of-thought" rationales improves language model performance on complex reasoning tasks like mathematics or commonsense question-answering. However, inducing language model rationale generation currently requires either constructing massive rationale datasets or sacrificing accuracy by using only few-shot inference. We propose a technique to iteratively leverage a small number of rationale examples and a large dataset without rationales, to bootstrap the ability to perform successively more complex reasoning. This technique, the "Self-Taught Reasoner" (STaR), relies on a simple loop: generate rationales to answer many questions, prompted with a few rationale examples; if the generated answers are wrong, try again to generate a rationale given the correct answer; fine-tune on all the rationales that ultimately yielded correct answers; repeat. We show that STaR significantly improves performance on multiple datasets compared to a model fine-tuned to directly predict final answers, and performs comparably to fine-tuning a 30times larger state-of-the-art language model on CommensenseQA. Thus, STaR lets a model improve itself by learning from its own generated reasoning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in handling complex reasoning tasks through step-by-step rationale generation. However, recent studies have raised concerns regarding the hallucination and flaws in their reasoning process. Substantial efforts are being made to improve the reliability and faithfulness of the generated rationales. Some approaches model reasoning as planning, while others focus on annotating for process supervision. Nevertheless, the planning-based search process often results in high latency due to the frequent assessment of intermediate reasoning states and the extensive exploration space. Additionally, supervising the reasoning process with human annotation is costly and challenging to scale for LLM training. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a framework to learn planning-based reasoning through direct preference optimization (DPO) on collected trajectories, which are ranked according to synthesized process rewards. Our results on challenging logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our learning framework, showing that our 7B model can surpass the strong counterparts like GPT-3.5-Turbo.

Foundation model-enabled generative artificial intelligence facilitates the development and implementation of agents, which can leverage distinguished reasoning and language processing capabilities to takes a proactive, autonomous role to pursue users' goals. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic knowledge to guide practitioners in designing the agents considering challenges of goal-seeking (including generating instrumental goals and plans), such as hallucinations inherent in foundation models, explainability of reasoning process, complex accountability, etc. To address this issue, we have performed a systematic literature review to understand the state-of-the-art foundation model-based agents and the broader ecosystem. In this paper, we present a pattern catalogue consisting of 18 architectural patterns with analyses of the context, forces, and trade-offs as the outcomes from the previous literature review. We propose a decision model for selecting the patterns. The proposed catalogue can provide holistic guidance for the effective use of patterns, and support the architecture design of foundation model-based agents by facilitating goal-seeking and plan generation.

Automated rationale generation is an approach for real-time explanation generation whereby a computational model learns to translate an autonomous agent's internal state and action data representations into natural language. Training on human explanation data can enable agents to learn to generate human-like explanations for their behavior. In this paper, using the context of an agent that plays Frogger, we describe (a) how to collect a corpus of explanations, (b) how to train a neural rationale generator to produce different styles of rationales, and (c) how people perceive these rationales. We conducted two user studies. The first study establishes the plausibility of each type of generated rationale and situates their user perceptions along the dimensions of confidence, humanlike-ness, adequate justification, and understandability. The second study further explores user preferences between the generated rationales with regard to confidence in the autonomous agent, communicating failure and unexpected behavior. Overall, we find alignment between the intended differences in features of the generated rationales and the perceived differences by users. Moreover, context permitting, participants preferred detailed rationales to form a stable mental model of the agent's behavior.

LLM-as-a-judge models have been used for evaluating both human and AI generated content, specifically by providing scores and rationales. Rationales, in addition to increasing transparency, help models learn to calibrate its judgments. Enhancing a model's rationale can therefore improve its calibration abilities and ultimately the ability to score content. We introduce Self-Rationalization, an iterative process of improving the rationales for the judge models, which consequently improves the score for fine-grained customizable scoring criteria (i.e., likert-scale scoring with arbitrary evaluation criteria). Self-rationalization works by having the model generate multiple judgments with rationales for the same input, curating a preference pair dataset from its own judgements, and iteratively fine-tuning the judge via DPO. Intuitively, this approach allows the judge model to self-improve by learning from its own rationales, leading to better alignment and evaluation accuracy. After just two iterations -- while only relying on examples in the training set -- human evaluation shows that our judge model learns to produce higher quality rationales, with a win rate of 62% on average compared to models just trained via SFT on rationale . This judge model also achieves high scoring accuracy on BigGen Bench and Reward Bench, outperforming even bigger sized models trained using SFT with rationale, self-consistency or best-of-N sampling by 3% to 9%.

Human-annotated textual explanations are becoming increasingly important in Explainable Natural Language Processing. Rationale extraction aims to provide faithful (i.e., reflective of the behavior of the model) and plausible (i.e., convincing to humans) explanations by highlighting the inputs that had the largest impact on the prediction without compromising the performance of the task model. In recent works, the focus of training rationale extractors was primarily on optimizing for plausibility using human highlights, while the task model was trained on jointly optimizing for task predictive accuracy and faithfulness. We propose REFER, a framework that employs a differentiable rationale extractor that allows to back-propagate through the rationale extraction process. We analyze the impact of using human highlights during training by jointly training the task model and the rationale extractor. In our experiments, REFER yields significantly better results in terms of faithfulness, plausibility, and downstream task accuracy on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution data. On both e-SNLI and CoS-E, our best setting produces better results in terms of composite normalized relative gain than the previous baselines by 11% and 3%, respectively.

We introduce LlavaGuard, a family of VLM-based safeguard models, offering a versatile framework for evaluating the safety compliance of visual content. Specifically, we designed LlavaGuard for dataset annotation and generative model safeguarding. To this end, we collected and annotated a high-quality visual dataset incorporating a broad safety taxonomy, which we use to tune VLMs on context-aware safety risks. As a key innovation, LlavaGuard's new responses contain comprehensive information, including a safety rating, the violated safety categories, and an in-depth rationale. Further, our introduced customizable taxonomy categories enable the context-specific alignment of LlavaGuard to various scenarios. Our experiments highlight the capabilities of LlavaGuard in complex and real-world applications. We provide checkpoints ranging from 7B to 34B parameters demonstrating state-of-the-art performance, with even the smallest models outperforming baselines like GPT-4. We make our dataset and model weights publicly available and invite further research to address the diverse needs of communities and contexts.

A multi-decade exploration into the theoretical foundations of artificial and natural general intelligence, which has been expressed in a series of books and papers and used to guide a series of practical and research-prototype software systems, is reviewed at a moderate level of detail. The review covers underlying philosophies (patternist philosophy of mind, foundational phenomenological and logical ontology), formalizations of the concept of intelligence, and a proposed high level architecture for AGI systems partly driven by these formalizations and philosophies. The implementation of specific cognitive processes such as logical reasoning, program learning, clustering and attention allocation in the context and language of this high level architecture is considered, as is the importance of a common (e.g. typed metagraph based) knowledge representation for enabling "cognitive synergy" between the various processes. The specifics of human-like cognitive architecture are presented as manifestations of these general principles, and key aspects of machine consciousness and machine ethics are also treated in this context. Lessons for practical implementation of advanced AGI in frameworks such as OpenCog Hyperon are briefly considered.

Achieving human-level intelligence requires refining the transition from the fast, intuitive System 1 to the slower, more deliberate System 2 reasoning. While System 1 excels in quick, heuristic decisions, System 2 relies on logical reasoning for more accurate judgments and reduced biases. Foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at fast decision-making but lack the depth for complex reasoning, as they have not yet fully embraced the step-by-step analysis characteristic of true System 2 thinking. Recently, reasoning LLMs like OpenAI's o1/o3 and DeepSeek's R1 have demonstrated expert-level performance in fields such as mathematics and coding, closely mimicking the deliberate reasoning of System 2 and showcasing human-like cognitive abilities. This survey begins with a brief overview of the progress in foundational LLMs and the early development of System 2 technologies, exploring how their combination has paved the way for reasoning LLMs. Next, we discuss how to construct reasoning LLMs, analyzing their features, the core methods enabling advanced reasoning, and the evolution of various reasoning LLMs. Additionally, we provide an overview of reasoning benchmarks, offering an in-depth comparison of the performance of representative reasoning LLMs. Finally, we explore promising directions for advancing reasoning LLMs and maintain a real-time https://github.com/zzli2022/Awesome-Slow-Reason-System{GitHub Repository} to track the latest developments. We hope this survey will serve as a valuable resource to inspire innovation and drive progress in this rapidly evolving field.

Rationale discovery is defined as finding a subset of the input data that maximally supports the prediction of downstream tasks. In graph machine learning context, graph rationale is defined to locate the critical subgraph in the given graph topology, which fundamentally determines the prediction results. In contrast to the rationale subgraph, the remaining subgraph is named the environment subgraph. Graph rationalization can enhance the model performance as the mapping between the graph rationale and prediction label is viewed as invariant, by assumption. To ensure the discriminative power of the extracted rationale subgraphs, a key technique named "intervention" is applied. The core idea of intervention is that given any changing environment subgraphs, the semantics from the rationale subgraph is invariant, which guarantees the correct prediction result. However, most, if not all, of the existing rationalization works on graph data develop their intervention strategies on the graph level, which is coarse-grained. In this paper, we propose well-tailored intervention strategies on graph data. Our idea is driven by the development of Transformer models, whose self-attention module provides rich interactions between input nodes. Based on the self-attention module, our proposed invariant graph Transformer (IGT) can achieve fine-grained, more specifically, node-level and virtual node-level intervention. Our comprehensive experiments involve 7 real-world datasets, and the proposed IGT shows significant performance advantages compared to 13 baseline methods.

Recently, slow-thinking reasoning systems, such as o1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks. These systems typically engage in an extended thinking process before responding to a query, allowing them to generate more thorough, accurate, and well-reasoned solutions. These systems are primarily developed and maintained by industry, with their core techniques not publicly disclosed. In response, an increasing number of studies from the research community aim to explore the technical foundations underlying these powerful reasoning systems. Building on these prior efforts, this paper presents a reproduction report on implementing o1-like reasoning systems. We introduce an "imitate, explore, and self-improve" framework as our primary technical approach to train the reasoning model. In the initial phase, we use distilled long-form thought data to fine-tune the reasoning model, enabling it to invoke a slow-thinking mode. The model is then encouraged to explore challenging problems by generating multiple rollouts, which can result in increasingly more high-quality trajectories that lead to correct answers. Furthermore, the model undergoes self-improvement by iteratively refining its training dataset. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to industry-level reasoning systems on these benchmarks.

The reasoning steps generated by LLMs might be incomplete, as they mimic logical leaps common in everyday communication found in their pre-training data: underlying rationales are frequently left implicit (unstated). To address this challenge, we introduce RATIONALYST, a model for process-supervision of reasoning based on pre-training on a vast collection of rationale annotations extracted from unlabeled data. We extract 79k rationales from web-scale unlabelled dataset (the Pile) and a combination of reasoning datasets with minimal human intervention. This web-scale pre-training for reasoning allows RATIONALYST to consistently generalize across diverse reasoning tasks, including mathematical, commonsense, scientific, and logical reasoning. Fine-tuned from LLaMa-3-8B, RATIONALYST improves the accuracy of reasoning by an average of 3.9% on 7 representative reasoning benchmarks. It also demonstrates superior performance compared to significantly larger verifiers like GPT-4 and similarly sized models fine-tuned on matching training sets.

Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.

The remarkable success in neural networks provokes the selective rationalization. It explains the prediction results by identifying a small subset of the inputs sufficient to support them. Since existing methods still suffer from adopting the shortcuts in data to compose rationales and limited large-scale annotated rationales by human, in this paper, we propose a Shortcuts-fused Selective Rationalization (SSR) method, which boosts the rationalization by discovering and exploiting potential shortcuts. Specifically, SSR first designs a shortcuts discovery approach to detect several potential shortcuts. Then, by introducing the identified shortcuts, we propose two strategies to mitigate the problem of utilizing shortcuts to compose rationales. Finally, we develop two data augmentations methods to close the gap in the number of annotated rationales. Extensive experimental results on real-world datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of our proposed method.

Recent studies have highlighted their proficiency in some simple tasks like writing and coding through various reasoning strategies. However, LLM agents still struggle with tasks that require comprehensive planning, a process that challenges current models and remains a critical research issue. In this study, we concentrate on travel planning, a Multi-Phases planning problem, that involves multiple interconnected stages, such as outlining, information gathering, and planning, often characterized by the need to manage various constraints and uncertainties. Existing reasoning approaches have struggled to effectively address this complex task. Our research aims to address this challenge by developing a human-like planning framework for LLM agents, i.e., guiding the LLM agent to simulate various steps that humans take when solving Multi-Phases problems. Specifically, we implement several strategies to enable LLM agents to generate a coherent outline for each travel query, mirroring human planning patterns. Additionally, we integrate Strategy Block and Knowledge Block into our framework: Strategy Block facilitates information collection, while Knowledge Block provides essential information for detailed planning. Through our extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the planning capabilities of LLM agents, enabling them to tackle the travel planning task with improved efficiency and effectiveness. Our experimental results showcase the exceptional performance of the proposed framework; when combined with GPT-4-Turbo, it attains 10times the performance gains in comparison to the baseline framework deployed on GPT-4-Turbo.

Understanding commonsense causality is a unique mark of intelligence for humans. It helps people understand the principles of the real world better and benefits the decision-making process related to causation. For instance, commonsense causality is crucial in judging whether a defendant's action causes the plaintiff's loss in determining legal liability. Despite its significance, a systematic exploration of this topic is notably lacking. Our comprehensive survey bridges this gap by focusing on taxonomies, benchmarks, acquisition methods, qualitative reasoning, and quantitative measurements in commonsense causality, synthesizing insights from over 200 representative articles. Our work aims to provide a systematic overview, update scholars on recent advancements, provide a pragmatic guide for beginners, and highlight promising future research directions in this vital field.

The reward hypothesis posits that, "all of what we mean by goals and purposes can be well thought of as maximization of the expected value of the cumulative sum of a received scalar signal (reward)." We aim to fully settle this hypothesis. This will not conclude with a simple affirmation or refutation, but rather specify completely the implicit requirements on goals and purposes under which the hypothesis holds.

Solving algebraic word problems requires executing a series of arithmetic operations---a program---to obtain a final answer. However, since programs can be arbitrarily complicated, inducing them directly from question-answer pairs is a formidable challenge. To make this task more feasible, we solve these problems by generating answer rationales, sequences of natural language and human-readable mathematical expressions that derive the final answer through a series of small steps. Although rationales do not explicitly specify programs, they provide a scaffolding for their structure via intermediate milestones. To evaluate our approach, we have created a new 100,000-sample dataset of questions, answers and rationales. Experimental results show that indirect supervision of program learning via answer rationales is a promising strategy for inducing arithmetic programs.

State-of-the-art models in NLP are now predominantly based on deep neural networks that are opaque in terms of how they come to make predictions. This limitation has increased interest in designing more interpretable deep models for NLP that reveal the `reasoning' behind model outputs. But work in this direction has been conducted on different datasets and tasks with correspondingly unique aims and metrics; this makes it difficult to track progress. We propose the Evaluating Rationales And Simple English Reasoning (ERASER) benchmark to advance research on interpretable models in NLP. This benchmark comprises multiple datasets and tasks for which human annotations of "rationales" (supporting evidence) have been collected. We propose several metrics that aim to capture how well the rationales provided by models align with human rationales, and also how faithful these rationales are (i.e., the degree to which provided rationales influenced the corresponding predictions). Our hope is that releasing this benchmark facilitates progress on designing more interpretable NLP systems. The benchmark, code, and documentation are available at https://www.eraserbenchmark.com/

We present that hierarchical LLM reasoning via scaling thought templates can effectively optimize the reasoning search space and outperform the mathematical reasoning capabilities of powerful LLMs like OpenAI o1-preview and DeepSeek V3. We train our ReasonFlux-32B model with only 8 GPUs and introduces three innovations: (i) a structured and generic thought template library, containing around 500 high-level thought templates capable of generalizing to similar or relevant reasoning problems; (ii) performing hierarchical reinforcement learning on a sequence of thought templates instead of long CoTs, optimizing a base LLM to plan out an optimal template trajectory for gradually handling complex problems; (iii) a brand new inference scaling system that enables hierarchical LLM reasoning by adaptively scaling thought templates at inference time. With a template trajectory containing sequential thought templates, our ReasonFlux-32B significantly advances math reasoning capabilities to state-of-the-art levels. Notably, on the MATH benchmark, it achieves an accuracy of 91.2% and surpasses o1-preview by 6.7%. On the USA Math Olympiad (AIME) benchmark, ReasonFlux-32B solves an average of 56.7% of problems, surpassing o1-preview and DeepSeek-V3 by 27% and 45%, respectively. Code: https://github.com/Gen-Verse/ReasonFlux

The ability of large language models to solve complex mathematical problems has progressed significantly, particularly for tasks requiring advanced reasoning. However, the scarcity of sufficiently challenging problems, particularly at the Olympiad level, hinders further advancements. In this work, we introduce PromptCoT, a novel approach for automatically generating high-quality Olympiad-level math problems. The proposed method synthesizes complex problems based on mathematical concepts and the rationale behind problem construction, emulating the thought processes of experienced problem designers. We provide a theoretical analysis demonstrating that an optimal rationale should maximize both the likelihood of rationale generation given the associated concepts and the likelihood of problem generation conditioned on both the rationale and the concepts. Our method is evaluated on standard benchmarks including GSM8K, MATH-500, and AIME2024, where it consistently outperforms existing problem generation methods. Furthermore, we demonstrate that PromptCoT exhibits superior data scalability, consistently maintaining high performance as the dataset size increases, outperforming the baselines. The implementation is available at https://github.com/zhaoxlpku/PromptCoT.

Explaining Artificial Intelligence (AI) decisions is a major challenge nowadays in AI, in particular when applied to sensitive scenarios like medicine and law. However, the need to explain the rationale behind decisions is a main issue also for human-based deliberation as it is important to justify why a certain decision has been taken. Resident medical doctors for instance are required not only to provide a (possibly correct) diagnosis, but also to explain how they reached a certain conclusion. Developing new tools to aid residents to train their explanation skills is therefore a central objective of AI in education. In this paper, we follow this direction, and we present, to the best of our knowledge, the first multilingual dataset for Medical Question Answering where correct and incorrect diagnoses for a clinical case are enriched with a natural language explanation written by doctors. These explanations have been manually annotated with argument components (i.e., premise, claim) and argument relations (i.e., attack, support), resulting in the Multilingual CasiMedicos-Arg dataset which consists of 558 clinical cases in four languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian) with explanations, where we annotated 5021 claims, 2313 premises, 2431 support relations, and 1106 attack relations. We conclude by showing how competitive baselines perform over this challenging dataset for the argument mining task.

LLMs have immense potential for generating plans, transforming an initial world state into a desired goal state. A large body of research has explored the use of LLMs for various planning tasks, from web navigation to travel planning and database querying. However, many of these systems are tailored to specific problems, making it challenging to compare them or determine the best approach for new tasks. There is also a lack of clear and consistent evaluation criteria. Our survey aims to offer a comprehensive overview of current LLM planners to fill this gap. It builds on foundational work by Kartam and Wilkins (1990) and examines six key performance criteria: completeness, executability, optimality, representation, generalization, and efficiency. For each, we provide a thorough analysis of representative works and highlight their strengths and weaknesses. Our paper also identifies crucial future directions, making it a valuable resource for both practitioners and newcomers interested in leveraging LLM planning to support agentic workflows.

Self-training approach for large language models (LLMs) improves reasoning abilities by training the models on their self-generated rationales. Previous approaches have labeled rationales that produce correct answers for a given question as appropriate for training. However, a single measure risks misjudging rationale quality, leading the models to learn flawed reasoning patterns. To address this issue, we propose CREST (Consistency-driven Rationale Evaluation for Self-Training), a self-training framework that further evaluates each rationale through follow-up questions and leverages this evaluation to guide its training. Specifically, we introduce two methods: (1) filtering out rationales that frequently result in incorrect answers on follow-up questions and (2) preference learning based on mixed preferences from rationale evaluation results of both original and follow-up questions. Experiments on three question-answering datasets using open LLMs show that CREST not only improves the logical robustness and correctness of rationales but also improves reasoning abilities compared to previous self-training approaches.

When writing and talking, people sometimes pause to think. Although reasoning-focused works have often framed reasoning as a method of answering questions or completing agentic tasks, reasoning is implicit in almost all written text. For example, this applies to the steps not stated between the lines of a proof or to the theory of mind underlying a conversation. In the Self-Taught Reasoner (STaR, Zelikman et al. 2022), useful thinking is learned by inferring rationales from few-shot examples in question-answering and learning from those that lead to a correct answer. This is a highly constrained setting -- ideally, a language model could instead learn to infer unstated rationales in arbitrary text. We present Quiet-STaR, a generalization of STaR in which LMs learn to generate rationales at each token to explain future text, improving their predictions. We address key challenges, including 1) the computational cost of generating continuations, 2) the fact that the LM does not initially know how to generate or use internal thoughts, and 3) the need to predict beyond individual next tokens. To resolve these, we propose a tokenwise parallel sampling algorithm, using learnable tokens indicating a thought's start and end, and an extended teacher-forcing technique. Encouragingly, generated rationales disproportionately help model difficult-to-predict tokens and improve the LM's ability to directly answer difficult questions. In particular, after continued pretraining of an LM on a corpus of internet text with Quiet-STaR, we find zero-shot improvements on GSM8K (5.9%rightarrow10.9%) and CommonsenseQA (36.3%rightarrow47.2%) and observe a perplexity improvement of difficult tokens in natural text. Crucially, these improvements require no fine-tuning on these tasks. Quiet-STaR marks a step towards LMs that can learn to reason in a more general and scalable way.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior capability to solve reasoning problems with programs. While being a promising direction, most of such frameworks are trained and evaluated in settings with a prior knowledge of task requirements. However, as LLMs become more capable, it is necessary to assess their reasoning abilities in more realistic scenarios where many real-world problems are open-ended with ambiguous scope, and often require multiple formalisms to solve. To investigate this, we introduce the task of reasoning in the wild, where an LLM is tasked to solve a reasoning problem of unknown type by identifying the subproblems and their corresponding formalisms, and writing a program to solve each subproblem, guided by a tactic. We create a large tactic-guided trajectory dataset containing detailed solutions to a diverse set of reasoning problems, ranging from well-defined single-form reasoning (e.g., math, logic), to ambiguous and hybrid ones (e.g., commonsense, combined math and logic). This allows us to test various aspects of LLMs reasoning at the fine-grained level such as the selection and execution of tactics, and the tendency to take undesired shortcuts. In experiments, we highlight that existing LLMs fail significantly on problems with ambiguous and mixed scope, revealing critical limitations and overfitting issues (e.g. accuracy on GSM8K drops by at least 50\%). We further show the potential of finetuning a local LLM on the tactic-guided trajectories in achieving better performance. Project repo is available at github.com/gblackout/Reason-in-the-Wild

In this work, we focus on the problem of retrieving relevant arguments for a query claim covering diverse aspects. State-of-the-art methods rely on explicit mappings between claims and premises, and thus are unable to utilize large available collections of premises without laborious and costly manual annotation. Their diversity approach relies on removing duplicates via clustering which does not directly ensure that the selected premises cover all aspects. This work introduces a new multi-step approach for the argument retrieval problem. Rather than relying on ground-truth assignments, our approach employs a machine learning model to capture semantic relationships between arguments. Beyond that, it aims to cover diverse facets of the query, instead of trying to identify duplicates explicitly. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that our approach leads to a significant improvement in the argument retrieval task even though it requires less data.

The concept of Artificial Intelligence has gained a lot of attention over the last decade. In particular, AI-based tools have been employed in several scenarios and are, by now, pervading our everyday life. Nonetheless, most of these systems lack many capabilities that we would naturally consider to be included in a notion of "intelligence". In this work, we present an architecture that, inspired by the cognitive theory known as Thinking Fast and Slow by D. Kahneman, is tasked with solving planning problems in different settings, specifically: classical and multi-agent epistemic. The system proposed is an instance of a more general AI paradigm, referred to as SOFAI (for Slow and Fast AI). SOFAI exploits multiple solving approaches, with different capabilities that characterize them as either fast or slow, and a metacognitive module to regulate them. This combination of components, which roughly reflects the human reasoning process according to D. Kahneman, allowed us to enhance the reasoning process that, in this case, is concerned with planning in two different settings. The behavior of this system is then compared to state-of-the-art solvers, showing that the newly introduced system presents better results in terms of generality, solving a wider set of problems with an acceptable trade-off between solving times and solution accuracy.

Ocean science, which delves into the oceans that are reservoirs of life and biodiversity, is of great significance given that oceans cover over 70% of our planet's surface. Recently, advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed the paradigm in science. Despite the success in other domains, current LLMs often fall short in catering to the needs of domain experts like oceanographers, and the potential of LLMs for ocean science is under-explored. The intrinsic reasons are the immense and intricate nature of ocean data as well as the necessity for higher granularity and richness in knowledge. To alleviate these issues, we introduce OceanGPT, the first-ever large language model in the ocean domain, which is expert in various ocean science tasks. We also propose OceanGPT, a novel framework to automatically obtain a large volume of ocean domain instruction data, which generates instructions based on multi-agent collaboration. Additionally, we construct the first oceanography benchmark, OceanBench, to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in the ocean domain. Though comprehensive experiments, OceanGPT not only shows a higher level of knowledge expertise for oceans science tasks but also gains preliminary embodied intelligence capabilities in ocean technology.

This textbook covers principles behind main modern deep reinforcement learning algorithms that achieved breakthrough results in many domains from game AI to robotics. All required theory is explained with proofs using unified notation and emphasize on the differences between different types of algorithms and the reasons why they are constructed the way they are.

Generating accurate step-by-step reasoning is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to address complex problems and enhance robustness and interpretability. Despite the flux of research on developing advanced reasoning approaches, systematically analyzing the diverse LLMs and reasoning strategies in generating reasoning chains remains a significant challenge. The difficulties stem from the lack of two key elements: (1) an automatic method for evaluating the generated reasoning chains on different tasks, and (2) a unified formalism and implementation of the diverse reasoning approaches for systematic comparison. This paper aims to close the gap: (1) We introduce AutoRace for fully automated reasoning chain evaluation. Existing metrics rely on expensive human annotations or pre-defined LLM prompts not adaptable to different tasks. In contrast, AutoRace automatically creates detailed evaluation criteria tailored for each task, and uses GPT-4 for accurate evaluation following the criteria. (2) We develop LLM Reasoners, a library for standardized modular implementation of existing and new reasoning algorithms, under a unified formulation of the search, reward, and world model components. With the new evaluation and library, (3) we conduct extensive study of different reasoning approaches (e.g., CoT, ToT, RAP). The analysis reveals interesting findings about different factors contributing to reasoning, including the reward-guidance, breadth-vs-depth in search, world model, and prompt formats, etc.

Studies have underscored how, regardless of the recent breakthrough and swift advances in AI research, even state-of-the-art Large Language models (LLMs) continue to struggle when performing logical and mathematical reasoning. The results seem to suggest that LLMs still work as (highly advanced) data pattern identifiers, scoring poorly when attempting to generalise and solve reasoning problems the models have never previously seen or that are not close to samples presented in their training data. To address this compelling concern, this paper makes use of the notion of critical questions from the literature on argumentation theory, focusing in particular on Toulmin's model of argumentation. We show that employing these critical questions can improve the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By probing the rationale behind the models' reasoning process, the LLM can assess whether some logical mistake is occurring and correct it before providing the final reply to the user prompt. The underlying idea is drawn from the gold standard of any valid argumentative procedure: the conclusion is valid if it is entailed by accepted premises. Or, to paraphrase such Aristotelian principle in a real-world approximation, characterised by incomplete information and presumptive logic, the conclusion is valid if not proved otherwise. This approach successfully steers the models' output through a reasoning pipeline, resulting in better performance against the baseline and its Chain-of-Thought (CoT) implementation. To this end, an extensive evaluation of the proposed approach on the MT-Bench Reasoning and Math tasks across a range of LLMs is provided.

We introduce a novel framework, LM-Guided CoT, that leverages a lightweight (i.e., <1B) language model (LM) for guiding a black-box large (i.e., >10B) LM in reasoning tasks. Specifically, the lightweight LM first generates a rationale for each input instance. The Frozen large LM is then prompted to predict a task output based on the rationale generated by the lightweight LM. Our approach is resource-efficient in the sense that it only requires training the lightweight LM. We optimize the model through 1) knowledge distillation and 2) reinforcement learning from rationale-oriented and task-oriented reward signals. We assess our method with multi-hop extractive question answering (QA) benchmarks, HotpotQA, and 2WikiMultiHopQA. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms all baselines regarding answer prediction accuracy. We also find that reinforcement learning helps the model to produce higher-quality rationales with improved QA performance.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive real-world utility, exemplifying artificial useful intelligence (AUI). However, their ability to reason adaptively and robustly -- the hallmarks of artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- remains fragile. While LLMs seemingly succeed in commonsense reasoning, programming, and mathematics, they struggle to generalize algorithmic understanding across novel contexts. Our experiments with algorithmic tasks in esoteric programming languages reveal that LLM's reasoning overfits to the training data and is limited in its transferability. We hypothesize that the core issue underlying such limited transferability is the coupling of reasoning and knowledge in LLMs. To transition from AUI to AGI, we propose disentangling knowledge and reasoning through three key directions: (1) pretaining to reason using RL from scratch as an alternative to the widely used next-token prediction pretraining, (2) using a curriculum of synthetic tasks to ease the learning of a reasoning prior for RL that can then be transferred to natural language tasks, and (3) learning more generalizable reasoning functions using a small context window to reduce exploiting spurious correlations between tokens. Such a reasoning system coupled with a trained retrieval system and a large external memory bank as a knowledge store can overcome several limitations of existing architectures at learning to reason in novel scenarios.

Retrieval-augmented generation has gained significant attention due to its ability to integrate relevant external knowledge, enhancing the accuracy and reliability of the LLMs' responses. Most of the existing methods apply a dynamic multiple retrieval-generating process, to address multi-hop complex questions by decomposing them into sub-problems. However, these methods rely on an unidirectional forward reasoning paradigm, where errors from insufficient reasoning steps or inherent flaws in current retrieval systems are irreversible, potentially derailing the entire reasoning chain. For the first time, this work introduces Retroactive Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RetroRAG), a novel framework to build a retroactive reasoning paradigm. RetroRAG revises and updates the evidence, redirecting the reasoning chain to the correct direction. RetroRAG constructs an evidence-collation-discovery framework to search, generate, and refine credible evidence. It synthesizes inferential evidence related to the key entities in the question from the existing source knowledge and formulates search queries to uncover additional information. As new evidence is found, RetroRAG continually updates and organizes this information, enhancing its ability to locate further necessary evidence. Paired with an Answerer to generate and evaluate outputs, RetroRAG is capable of refining its reasoning process iteratively until a reliable answer is obtained. Empirical evaluations show that RetroRAG significantly outperforms existing methods.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown strong general reasoning abilities, yet their effectiveness in financial reasoning remains underexplored. In this study, we comprehensively evaluate 16 powerful reasoning and general LLMs on three complex financial tasks involving financial text, tabular data, and equations, assessing numerical reasoning, tabular interpretation, financial terminology comprehension, long-context processing, and equation-based problem solving. Our results show that while better datasets and pretraining improve financial reasoning, general enhancements like CoT fine-tuning do not always yield consistent gains. Moreover, all reasoning strategies face challenges in improving performance on long-context and multi-table tasks. To address these limitations, we develop a financial reasoning-enhanced model based on Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, by CoT fine-tuning and reinforcement learning with domain-specific reasoning paths. Even with simple fine-tuning with one financial dataset, our model achieves a consistent 10% performance improvement across tasks, surpassing all 8B models and even Llama3-70B-Instruct and Llama3.1-70B-Instruct on average. Our results highlight the need for domain-specific adaptations in financial tasks, emphasizing future directions such as multi-table reasoning, long-context processing, and financial terminology comprehension. All our datasets, models, and codes are publicly available. Furthermore, we introduce a leaderboard for benchmarking future datasets and models.

In most current research, large language models (LLMs) are able to perform reasoning tasks by generating chains of thought through the guidance of specific prompts. However, there still exists a significant discrepancy between their capability in solving complex reasoning problems and that of humans. At present, most approaches focus on chains of thought (COT) and tool use, without considering the adoption and application of human cognitive frameworks. It is well-known that when confronting complex reasoning challenges, humans typically employ various cognitive abilities, and necessitate interaction with all aspects of tools, knowledge, and the external environment information to accomplish intricate tasks. This paper introduces a novel intelligent framework, referred to as OlaGPT. OlaGPT carefully studied a cognitive architecture framework, and propose to simulate certain aspects of human cognition. The framework involves approximating different cognitive modules, including attention, memory, reasoning, learning, and corresponding scheduling and decision-making mechanisms. Inspired by the active learning mechanism of human beings, it proposes a learning unit to record previous mistakes and expert opinions, and dynamically refer to them to strengthen their ability to solve similar problems. The paper also outlines common effective reasoning frameworks for human problem-solving and designs Chain-of-Thought (COT) templates accordingly. A comprehensive decision-making mechanism is also proposed to maximize model accuracy. The efficacy of OlaGPT has been stringently evaluated on multiple reasoning datasets, and the experimental outcomes reveal that OlaGPT surpasses state-of-the-art benchmarks, demonstrating its superior performance. Our implementation of OlaGPT is available on GitHub: https://github.com/oladata-team/OlaGPT.

Providing high quality explanations for AI predictions based on machine learning is a challenging and complex task. To work well it requires, among other factors: selecting a proper level of generality/specificity of the explanation; considering assumptions about the familiarity of the explanation beneficiary with the AI task under consideration; referring to specific elements that have contributed to the decision; making use of additional knowledge (e.g. expert evidence) which might not be part of the prediction process; and providing evidence supporting negative hypothesis. Finally, the system needs to formulate the explanation in a clearly interpretable, and possibly convincing, way. Given these considerations, ANTIDOTE fosters an integrated vision of explainable AI, where low-level characteristics of the deep learning process are combined with higher level schemes proper of the human argumentation capacity. ANTIDOTE will exploit cross-disciplinary competences in deep learning and argumentation to support a broader and innovative view of explainable AI, where the need for high-quality explanations for clinical cases deliberation is critical. As a first result of the project, we publish the Antidote CasiMedicos dataset to facilitate research on explainable AI in general, and argumentation in the medical domain in particular.

Saliency post-hoc explainability methods are important tools for understanding increasingly complex NLP models. While these methods can reflect the model's reasoning, they may not align with human intuition, making the explanations not plausible. In this work, we present a methodology for incorporating rationales, which are text annotations explaining human decisions, into text classification models. This incorporation enhances the plausibility of post-hoc explanations while preserving their faithfulness. Our approach is agnostic to model architectures and explainability methods. We introduce the rationales during model training by augmenting the standard cross-entropy loss with a novel loss function inspired by contrastive learning. By leveraging a multi-objective optimization algorithm, we explore the trade-off between the two loss functions and generate a Pareto-optimal frontier of models that balance performance and plausibility. Through extensive experiments involving diverse models, datasets, and explainability methods, we demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the quality of model explanations without causing substantial (sometimes negligible) degradation in the original model's performance.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of tasks. Advances in prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques have further enhanced their ability to address complex reasoning challenges. However, these advanced capabilities are often exclusive to models exceeding 100 billion parameters. Although Chain-of-Thought (CoT) fine-tuning methods have been explored for smaller models (under 10 billion parameters), they typically depend on extensive CoT training data, which can introduce inconsistencies and limit effectiveness in low-data settings. To overcome these limitations, this paper introduce a new reasoning strategy Solution Guidance (SG) and a plug-and-play training paradigm Solution-Guidance Fine-Tuning (SGFT) for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of small language models. SG focuses on problem understanding and decomposition at the semantic and logical levels, rather than specific computations, which can effectively improve the SLMs' generalization and reasoning abilities. With only a small amount of SG training data, SGFT can fine-tune a SLM to produce accurate problem-solving guidances, which can then be flexibly fed to any SLM as prompts, enabling it to generate correct answers directly. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of SLMs on various reasoning tasks, enhancing both their practicality and efficiency within resource-constrained environments.

Step-by-step reasoning is widely used to enhance the reasoning ability of large language models (LLMs) in complex problems. Evaluating the quality of reasoning traces is crucial for understanding and improving LLM reasoning. However, the evaluation criteria remain highly unstandardized, leading to fragmented efforts in developing metrics and meta-evaluation benchmarks. To address this gap, this survey provides a comprehensive overview of step-by-step reasoning evaluation, proposing a taxonomy of evaluation criteria with four top-level categories (groundedness, validity, coherence, and utility). We then categorize metrics based on their implementations, survey which metrics are used for assessing each criterion, and explore whether evaluator models can transfer across different criteria. Finally, we identify key directions for future research.

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited complex reasoning abilities by generating question rationales and demonstrated exceptional performance in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these reasoning capabilities generally emerge in models with tens of billions of parameters, creating significant computational challenges for real-world deployment. Recent research has concentrated on improving open-source smaller models through knowledge distillation (KD) from commercial LLMs. Nevertheless, most of these studies rely solely on the responses from one single LLM as the gold rationale for training. In this paper, we introduce a novel Mistake-Aware Peer-Review Distillation (MAPD) approach: 1) Instead of merely obtaining gold rationales from teachers, our method asks teachers to identify and explain the student's mistakes, providing customized instruction learning data. 2) We design a simulated peer-review process between teacher LLMs, which selects only the generated rationales above the acceptance threshold. This reduces the chance of teachers guessing correctly with flawed rationale, improving instructional data quality. Comprehensive experiments and analysis on mathematical, commonsense, and logical reasoning tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Recent advancements in the field of large language models, particularly through the Chain of Thought (CoT) approach, have demonstrated significant improvements in solving complex problems. However, existing models either tend to sacrifice detailed reasoning for brevity due to user preferences, or require extensive and expensive training data to learn complicated reasoning ability, limiting their potential in solving complex tasks. To bridge this gap, following the concept of scaling test-time, we propose a simple method by encouraging models to adopt a more patient reasoning style without the need of introducing new knowledge or skills. To employ a preference optimization approach, we generate detailed reasoning processes as positive examples and simple answers as negative examples, thereby training the model to favor thoroughness in its responses. Our results demonstrate a performance increase of up to 6.7% on GSM8k with training just on a lightweight dataset.

Large language models (LLMs) are primarily evaluated by overall performance on various text understanding and generation tasks. However, such a paradigm fails to comprehensively differentiate the fine-grained language and cognitive skills, rendering the lack of sufficient interpretation to LLMs' capabilities. In this paper, we present FAC^2E, a framework for Fine-grAined and Cognition-grounded LLMs' Capability Evaluation. Specifically, we formulate LLMs' evaluation in a multi-dimensional and explainable manner by dissociating the language-related capabilities and the cognition-related ones. Besides, through extracting the intermediate reasoning from LLMs, we further break down the process of applying a specific capability into three sub-steps: recalling relevant knowledge, utilizing knowledge, and solving problems. Finally, FAC^2E evaluates each sub-step of each fine-grained capability, providing a two-faceted diagnosis for LLMs. Utilizing FAC^2E, we identify a common shortfall in knowledge utilization among models and propose a straightforward, knowledge-enhanced method to mitigate this issue. Our results not only showcase promising performance enhancements but also highlight a direction for future LLM advancements.

Reasoning language models (RLMs), also known as Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), such as OpenAI's o1 and o3, DeepSeek-V3, and Alibaba's QwQ, have redefined AI's problem-solving capabilities by extending large language models (LLMs) with advanced reasoning mechanisms. Yet, their high costs, proprietary nature, and complex architectures - uniquely combining Reinforcement Learning (RL), search heuristics, and LLMs - present accessibility and scalability challenges. To address these, we propose a comprehensive blueprint that organizes RLM components into a modular framework, based on a survey and analysis of all RLM works. This blueprint incorporates diverse reasoning structures (chains, trees, graphs, and nested forms), reasoning strategies (e.g., Monte Carlo Tree Search, Beam Search), RL concepts (policy, value models and others), and supervision schemes (Output-Based and Process-Based Supervision). We also provide detailed mathematical formulations and algorithmic specifications to simplify RLM implementation. By showing how schemes like LLaMA-Berry, QwQ, Journey Learning, and Graph of Thoughts fit as special cases, we demonstrate the blueprint's versatility and unifying potential. To illustrate its utility, we introduce x1, a modular implementation for rapid RLM prototyping and experimentation. Using x1 and a literature review, we provide key insights, such as multi-phase training for policy and value models, and the importance of familiar training distributions. Finally, we outline how RLMs can integrate with a broader LLM ecosystem, including tools and databases. Our work demystifies RLM construction, democratizes advanced reasoning capabilities, and fosters innovation, aiming to mitigate the gap between "rich AI" and "poor AI" by lowering barriers to RLM development and experimentation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have succeeded remarkably in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their reasoning capabilities remain a fundamental challenge. While LLMs exhibit impressive fluency and factual recall, their ability to perform complex reasoning-spanning logical deduction, mathematical problem-solving, commonsense inference, and multi-step reasoning-often falls short of human expectations. This survey provides a comprehensive review of emerging techniques enhancing reasoning in LLMs. We categorize existing methods into key approaches, including prompting strategies (e.g., Chain-of-Thought reasoning, Self-Consistency, and Tree-of-Thought reasoning), architectural innovations (e.g., retrieval-augmented models, modular reasoning networks, and neuro-symbolic integration), and learning paradigms (e.g., fine-tuning with reasoning-specific datasets, reinforcement learning, and self-supervised reasoning objectives). Additionally, we explore evaluation frameworks used to assess reasoning in LLMs and highlight open challenges, such as hallucinations, robustness, and reasoning generalization across diverse tasks. By synthesizing recent advancements, this survey aims to provide insights into promising directions for future research and practical applications of reasoning-augmented LLMs.

We examine the connections between deterministic, complete, and general global optimisation of continuous functions and a general concept of regression from the perspective of constructive type theory via the concept of 'searchability'. We see how the property of convergence of global optimisation is a straightforward consequence of searchability. The abstract setting allows us to generalise searchability and continuity to higher-order functions, so that we can formulate novel convergence criteria for regression, derived from the convergence of global optimisation. All the theory and the motivating examples are fully formalised in the proof assistant Agda.

The self-rationalising capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have been explored in restricted settings, using task/specific data sets. However, current LLMs do not (only) rely on specifically annotated data; nonetheless, they frequently explain their outputs. The properties of the generated explanations are influenced by the pre-training corpus and by the target data used for instruction fine-tuning. As the pre-training corpus includes a large amount of human-written explanations "in the wild", we hypothesise that LLMs adopt common properties of human explanations. By analysing the outputs for a multi-domain instruction fine-tuning data set, we find that generated explanations show selectivity and contain illustrative elements, but less frequently are subjective or misleading. We discuss reasons and consequences of the properties' presence or absence. In particular, we outline positive and negative implications depending on the goals and user groups of the self-rationalising system.

Reasoning is most powerful when an LLM accurately aggregates relevant information. We examine the critical role of information aggregation in reasoning by requiring the LLM to analyze sports narratives. To succeed at this task, an LLM must infer points from actions, identify related entities, attribute points accurately to players and teams, and compile key statistics to draw conclusions. We conduct comprehensive experiments with real NBA basketball data and present SportsGen, a new method to synthesize game narratives. By synthesizing data, we can rigorously evaluate LLMs' reasoning capabilities under complex scenarios with varying narrative lengths and density of information. Our findings show that most models, including GPT-4o, often fail to accurately aggregate basketball scores due to frequent scoring patterns. Open-source models like Llama-3 further suffer from significant score hallucinations. Finally, the effectiveness of reasoning is influenced by narrative complexity, information density, and domain-specific terms, highlighting the challenges in analytical reasoning tasks.

Incorporating natural language rationales in the prompt and In-Context Learning (ICL) has led to a significant improvement of Large Language Models (LLMs) performance. However, rationales currently require human-annotation or the use of auxiliary proxy models to target promising samples or generate high-quality rationales. In this work, we propose Self-AMPLIFY to generate automatically rationales from post hoc explanation methods applied to Small Language Models (SLMs) to improve their own performance. Self-AMPLIFY is a 3-step method that targets samples, generates rationales and builds a final prompt to leverage ICL. Self-AMPLIFY performance is evaluated on two SLMs and two datasets requiring reasoning abilities: these experiments show that Self-AMPLIFY achieves good results against competitors. Self-AMPLIFY is the first method to apply post hoc explanation methods to SLM to generate rationales to improve their own performance in a fully automated manner.

The integration of slow-thinking mechanisms into large language models (LLMs) offers a promising way toward achieving Level 2 AGI Reasoners, as exemplified by systems like OpenAI's o1. However, several significant challenges remain, including inefficient overthinking and an overreliance on auxiliary reward models. We point out that these limitations stem from LLMs' inability to internalize the search process, a key component of effective reasoning. A critical step toward addressing this issue is enabling LLMs to autonomously determine when and where to backtrack, a fundamental operation in traditional search algorithms. To this end, we propose a self-backtracking mechanism that equips LLMs with the ability to backtrack during both training and inference. This mechanism not only enhances reasoning ability but also efficiency by transforming slow-thinking processes into fast-thinking through self-improvement. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our proposal significantly enhances the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, achieving a performance gain of over 40 percent compared to the optimal-path supervised fine-tuning method. We believe this study introduces a novel and promising pathway for developing more advanced and robust Reasoners.