Problem Solving
Imitate, Explore, and Self-Improve: A Reproduction Report on Slow-thinking Reasoning Systems
Min, Yingqian, Chen, Zhipeng, Jiang, Jinhao, Chen, Jie, Deng, Jia, Hu, Yiwen, Tang, Yiru, Wang, Jiapeng, Cheng, Xiaoxue, Song, Huatong, Zhao, Wayne Xin, Liu, Zheng, Wang, Zhongyuan, Wen, Ji-Rong
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, denoted as \textbf{STILL-2}, 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.
Aristotle: Mastering Logical Reasoning with A Logic-Complete Decompose-Search-Resolve Framework
Xu, Jundong, Fei, Hao, Luo, Meng, Liu, Qian, Pan, Liangming, Wang, William Yang, Nakov, Preslav, Lee, Mong-Li, Hsu, Wynne
In the context of large language models (LLMs), current advanced reasoning methods have made impressive strides in various reasoning tasks. However, when it comes to logical reasoning tasks, major challenges remain in both efficacy and efficiency. This is rooted in the fact that these systems fail to fully leverage the inherent structure of logical tasks throughout the reasoning processes such as decomposition, search, and resolution. To address this, we propose a logic-complete reasoning framework, Aristotle, with three key components: Logical Decomposer, Logical Search Router, and Logical Resolver. In our framework, symbolic expressions and logical rules are comprehensively integrated into the entire reasoning process, significantly alleviating the bottlenecks of logical reasoning, i.e., reducing sub-task complexity, minimizing search errors, and resolving logical contradictions. The experimental results on several datasets demonstrate that Aristotle consistently outperforms state-of-the-art reasoning frameworks in both accuracy and efficiency, particularly excelling in complex logical reasoning scenarios. We will open-source all our code at https://github.com/Aiden0526/Aristotle.
Do Multimodal Language Models Really Understand Direction? A Benchmark for Compass Direction Reasoning
Yin, Hang, Lin, Zhifeng, Liu, Xin, Sun, Bin, Li, Kan
Direction reasoning is essential for intelligent systems to understand the real world. While existing work focuses primarily on spatial reasoning, compass direction reasoning remains underexplored. To address this, we propose the Compass Direction Reasoning (CDR) benchmark, designed to evaluate the direction reasoning capabilities of multimodal language models (MLMs). CDR includes three types images to test spatial (up, down, left, right) and compass (north, south, east, west) directions. Our evaluation reveals that most MLMs struggle with direction reasoning, often performing at random guessing levels. Experiments show that training directly with CDR data yields limited improvements, as it requires an understanding of real-world physical rules. We explore the impact of mixdata and CoT fine-tuning methods, which significantly enhance MLM performance in compass direction reasoning by incorporating diverse data and step-by-step reasoning, improving the model's ability to understand direction relationships.
CognTKE: A Cognitive Temporal Knowledge Extrapolation Framework
Chen, Wei, Wu, Yuting, Wu, Shuhan, Zhang, Zhiyu, Liao, Mengqi, Lin, Youfang, Wan, Huaiyu
Reasoning future unknowable facts on temporal knowledge graphs (TKGs) is a challenging task, holding significant academic and practical values for various fields. Existing studies exploring explainable reasoning concentrate on modeling comprehensible temporal paths relevant to the query. Yet, these path-based methods primarily focus on local temporal paths appearing in recent times, failing to capture the complex temporal paths in TKG and resulting in the loss of longer historical relations related to the query. Motivated by the Dual Process Theory in cognitive science, we propose a \textbf{Cogn}itive \textbf{T}emporal \textbf{K}nowledge \textbf{E}xtrapolation framework (CognTKE), which introduces a novel temporal cognitive relation directed graph (TCR-Digraph) and performs interpretable global shallow reasoning and local deep reasoning over the TCR-Digraph. Specifically, the proposed TCR-Digraph is constituted by retrieving significant local and global historical temporal relation paths associated with the query. In addition, CognTKE presents the global shallow reasoner and the local deep reasoner to perform global one-hop temporal relation reasoning (System 1) and local complex multi-hop path reasoning (System 2) over the TCR-Digraph, respectively. The experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that CognTKE achieves significant improvement in accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art baselines and delivers excellent zero-shot reasoning ability. \textit{The code is available at https://github.com/WeiChen3690/CognTKE}.
Formal Mathematical Reasoning: A New Frontier in AI
Yang, Kaiyu, Poesia, Gabriel, He, Jingxuan, Li, Wenda, Lauter, Kristin, Chaudhuri, Swarat, Song, Dawn
AI for Mathematics (AI4Math) is not only intriguing intellectually but also crucial for AI-driven discovery in science, engineering, and beyond. Extensive efforts on AI4Math have mirrored techniques in NLP, in particular, training large language models on carefully curated math datasets in text form. As a complementary yet less explored avenue, formal mathematical reasoning is grounded in formal systems such as proof assistants, which can verify the correctness of reasoning and provide automatic feedback. In this position paper, we advocate for formal mathematical reasoning and argue that it is indispensable for advancing AI4Math to the next level. In recent years, we have seen steady progress in using AI to perform formal reasoning, including core tasks such as theorem proving and autoformalization, as well as emerging applications such as verifiable generation of code and hardware designs. However, significant challenges remain to be solved for AI to truly master mathematics and achieve broader impact. We summarize existing progress, discuss open challenges, and envision critical milestones to measure future success. At this inflection point for formal mathematical reasoning, we call on the research community to come together to drive transformative advancements in this field.
Ensembling Large Language Models with Process Reward-Guided Tree Search for Better Complex Reasoning
Park, Sungjin, Liu, Xiao, Gong, Yeyun, Choi, Edward
Despite recent advances in large language models, open-source models often struggle to consistently perform well on complex reasoning tasks. Existing ensemble methods, whether applied at the token or output levels, fail to address these challenges. In response, we present Language model Ensemble with Monte Carlo Tree Search (LE-MCTS), a novel framework for process-level ensembling of language models. LE-MCTS formulates step-by-step reasoning with an ensemble of language models as a Markov decision process. In this framework, states represent intermediate reasoning paths, while actions consist of generating the next reasoning step using one of the language models selected from a predefined pool. Guided by a process-based reward model, LE-MCTS performs a tree search over the reasoning steps generated by different language models, identifying the most accurate reasoning chain. Experimental results on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our approach outperforms both single language model decoding algorithms and language model ensemble methods. Notably, LE-MCTS improves performance by 3.6% and 4.3% on the MATH and MQA datasets, respectively, highlighting its effectiveness in solving complex reasoning problems.
Error-driven Data-efficient Large Multimodal Model Tuning
Yao, Barry Menglong, Wang, Qifan, Huang, Lifu
Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across numerous academic benchmarks. However, fine-tuning still remains essential to achieve satisfactory performance on downstream tasks, while the task-specific tuning samples are usually not readily available or expensive and time-consuming to obtain. To address this, we propose an error-driven data-efficient tuning framework that aims to efficiently adapt generic LMMs to newly emerging tasks without requiring any task-specific training samples. In our approach, a generic LMM, acting as a student model, is first evaluated on a small validation set of the target task, and then a more powerful model, acting as a teacher model, identifies the erroneous steps within the student model's reasoning steps and analyzes its capability gaps from fully addressing the target task. Based on these gaps, targeted training samples are further retrieved from existing task-agnostic datasets to tune the student model and tailor it to the target task. We perform extensive experiments across three different training data scales and seven tasks, demonstrating that our training paradigm significantly and efficiently improves LMM's performance on downstream tasks, achieving an average performance boost of 7.01%.
Outcome-Refining Process Supervision for Code Generation
Yu, Zhuohao, Gu, Weizheng, Wang, Yidong, Zeng, Zhengran, Wang, Jindong, Ye, Wei, Zhang, Shikun
Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, yet they often struggle with complex programming tasks that require deep algorithmic reasoning. While process supervision through learned reward models shows promise in guiding reasoning steps, it requires expensive training data and suffers from unreliable evaluation. We propose Outcome-Refining Process Supervision, a novel paradigm that treats outcome refinement itself as the process to be supervised. Our framework leverages concrete execution signals to ground the supervision of reasoning steps, while using tree-structured exploration to maintain multiple solution trajectories simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that our approach enables even smaller models to achieve high success accuracy and performance metrics on competitive programming tasks, creates more reliable verification than traditional reward models without requiring training PRMs. Our approach achieves significant improvements across 5 models and 3 datasets: an average of 26.9% increase in correctness and 42.2% in efficiency. The results suggest that providing structured reasoning space with concrete verification signals is crucial for solving complex programming tasks. We open-source all our code and data at: https://github.com/zhuohaoyu/ORPS
PRIMA: Multi-Image Vision-Language Models for Reasoning Segmentation
Wahed, Muntasir, Nguyen, Kiet A., Juvekar, Adheesh Sunil, Li, Xinzhuo, Zhou, Xiaona, Shah, Vedant, Yu, Tianjiao, Yanardag, Pinar, Lourentzou, Ismini
Despite significant advancements in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs), existing pixel-grounding models operate on single-image settings, limiting their ability to perform detailed, fine-grained comparisons across multiple images. Conversely, current multi-image understanding models lack pixel-level grounding. Our work addresses this gap by introducing the task of multi-image pixel-grounded reasoning segmentation, and PRIMA, a novel LVLM that integrates pixel-level grounding with robust multi-image reasoning capabilities to produce contextually rich, pixel-grounded explanations. Central to PRIMA is an efficient vision module that queries fine-grained visual representations across multiple images, reducing TFLOPs by $25.3\%$. To support training and evaluation, we curate $M^4Seg$, a new reasoning segmentation benchmark consisting of $\sim$224K question-answer pairs that require fine-grained visual understanding across multiple images. Experimental results demonstrate PRIMA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines.
Data for Mathematical Copilots: Better Ways of Presenting Proofs for Machine Learning
Frieder, Simon, Bayer, Jonas, Collins, Katherine M., Berner, Julius, Loader, Jacob, Juhász, András, Ruehle, Fabian, Welleck, Sean, Poesia, Gabriel, Griffiths, Ryan-Rhys, Weller, Adrian, Goyal, Anirudh, Lukasiewicz, Thomas, Gowers, Timothy
The suite of datasets commonly used to train and evaluate the mathematical capabilities of AI-based mathematical copilots (primarily large language models) exhibit several shortcomings. These limitations include a restricted scope of mathematical complexity, typically not exceeding lower undergraduate-level mathematics, binary rating protocols and other issues, which makes comprehensive proof-based evaluation suites difficult. We systematically explore these limitations and contend that enhancing the capabilities of large language models, or any forthcoming advancements in AI-based mathematical assistants (copilots or "thought partners"), necessitates a paradigm shift in the design of mathematical datasets and the evaluation criteria of mathematical ability: It is necessary to move away from result-based datasets (theorem statement to theorem proof) and convert the rich facets of mathematical research practice to data LLMs can train on. Examples of these are mathematical workflows (sequences of atomic, potentially subfield-dependent tasks that are often performed when creating new mathematics), which are an important part of the proof-discovery process. Additionally, we advocate for mathematical dataset developers to consider the concept of "motivated proof", introduced by G. P\'olya in 1949, which can serve as a blueprint for datasets that offer a better proof learning signal, alleviating some of the mentioned limitations. Lastly, we introduce math datasheets for datasets, extending the general, dataset-agnostic variants of datasheets: We provide a questionnaire designed specifically for math datasets that we urge dataset creators to include with their datasets. This will make creators aware of potential limitations of their datasets while at the same time making it easy for readers to assess it from the point of view of training and evaluating mathematical copilots.