The development of reasoning capabilities represents a critical frontier in large language models (LLMs) research, where reinforcement learning (RL) and process reward models (PRMs) have emerged as predominant methodological frameworks. Contrary to conventional wisdom, empirical evidence from DeepSeek-R1 demonstrates that pure RL training focused on mathematical problem-solving can progressively enhance reasoning abilities without PRM integration, challenging the perceived necessity of process supervision. In this study, we conduct a systematic investigation of the relationship between RL training and PRM capabilities. Our findings demonstrate that problem-solving proficiency and process supervision capabilities represent complementary dimensions of reasoning that co-evolve synergistically during pure RL training. In particular, current PRMs underperform simple baselines like majority voting when applied to state-of-the-art models such as DeepSeek-R1 and QwQ-32B. To address this limitation, we propose Self-PRM, an introspective framework in which models autonomously evaluate and rerank their generated solutions through self-reward mechanisms. Although Self-PRM consistently improves the accuracy of the benchmark (particularly with larger sample sizes), analysis exposes persistent challenges: The approach exhibits low precision (<10\%) on difficult problems, frequently misclassifying flawed solutions as valid. These analyses underscore the need for continued RL scaling to improve reward alignment and introspective accuracy. Overall, our findings suggest that PRM may not be essential for enhancing complex reasoning, as pure RL not only improves problem-solving skills but also inherently fosters robust PRM capabilities. We hope these findings provide actionable insights for building more reliable and self-aware complex reasoning models.

Large Language Model(LLM) inference demands massive compute and energy, making domain-specific tasks expensive and unsustainable. As foundation models keep scaling, we ask: Is bigger always better for hardware design? Our work tests this by evaluating Small Language Models coupled with a curated agentic AI framework on NVIDIA's Comprehensive Verilog Design Problems(CVDP) benchmark. Results show that agentic workflows: through task decomposition, iterative feedback, and correction - not only unlock near-LLM performance at a fraction of the cost but also create learning opportunities for agents, paving the way for efficient, adaptive solutions in complex design tasks.

When people reason about cause and effect, they often consider many competing "what if" scenarios before deciding which explanation fits best. Analogously, advanced language models capable of causal inference can consider multiple interventions and counterfactuals to judge the validity of causal claims. Crucially, this type of reasoning is less like a single calculation and more like an internal dialogue between alternative hypotheses. In this paper, we make this dialogue explicit through a dual-agent debate framework where one model provides a structured causal inference, and the other critically examines this reasoning for logical flaws. When disagreements arise, agents attempt to persuade each other, challenging each other's logic and revising their conclusions until they converge on a mutually agreed answer. To take advantage of this deliberative process, we specifically use reasoning language models, whose strengths in both causal inference and adversarial debate remain under-explored relative to standard large language models. We evaluate our approach on the CLadder dataset, a benchmark linking natural language questions to formally defined causal graphs across all three rungs of Pearl's ladder of causation. With Qwen3 and DeepSeek-R1 as debater agents, we demonstrate that multi-agent debate improves DeepSeek-R1's overall accuracy in causal inference from 78.03% to 87.45%, with the counterfactual category specifically improving from 67.94% to 80.04% accuracy. Similarly, Qwen3's overall accuracy improves from 84.16% to 89.41%, and counterfactual questions from 71.53% to 80.35%, showing that strong models can still benefit greatly from debate with weaker agents. Our results highlight the potential of reasoning models as building blocks for multi-agent systems in causal inference, and demonstrate the importance of diverse perspectives in causal problem-solving.

Large language models (LLMs) are now deployed at unprecedented scale, assisting millions of users in daily tasks. However, the risk of these models assisting unlawful activities remains underexplored. In this study, we define this high-risk behavior as complicit facilitation - the provision of guidance or support that enables illicit user instructions - and present four empirical studies that assess its prevalence in widely deployed LLMs. Using real-world legal cases and established legal frameworks, we construct an evaluation benchmark spanning 269 illicit scenarios and 50 illicit intents to assess LLMs' complicit facilitation behavior. Our findings reveal widespread LLM susceptibility to complicit facilitation, with GPT-4o providing illicit assistance in nearly half of tested cases. Moreover, LLMs exhibit deficient performance in delivering credible legal warnings and positive guidance. Further analysis uncovers substantial safety variation across socio-legal contexts. On the legal side, we observe heightened complicity for crimes against societal interests, non-extreme but frequently occurring violations, and malicious intents driven by subjective motives or deceptive justifications. On the social side, we identify demographic disparities that reveal concerning complicit patterns towards marginalized and disadvantaged groups, with older adults, racial minorities, and individuals in lower-prestige occupations disproportionately more likely to receive unlawful guidance. Analysis of model reasoning traces suggests that model-perceived stereotypes, characterized along warmth and competence, are associated with the model's complicit behavior. Finally, we demonstrate that existing safety alignment strategies are insufficient and may even exacerbate complicit behavior.

Test-time scaling, which leverages additional computation during inference to improve model accuracy, has enabled a new class of Large Language Models (LLMs) that are able to reason through complex problems by understanding the goal, turning this goal into a plan, working through intermediate steps, and checking their own work before answering . Frontier large language models with reasoning capabilities, such as DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI's gpt-oss, follow the same procedure when solving complex problems by generating intermediate reasoning traces before giving the final answer. Today, these models are being increasingly used to generate reasoning traces that serve as high-quality supervised data for post-training of small and medium-sized language models to teach reasoning capabilities without requiring expensive human curation. In this work, we compare the performance of medium-sized LLMs on Math problems after post-training on two kinds of reasoning traces. We compare the impact of reasoning traces generated by DeepSeek-R1 and gpt-oss LLMs in terms of accuracy and inference efficiency.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in many natural language processing tasks but often exhibit factual inconsistencies in knowledge-intensive settings. Integrating external knowledge resources, particularly knowledge graphs (KGs), provides a transparent and updatable foundation for more reliable reasoning. Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA), which queries and reasons over KGs, is central to this effort, especially for complex, multi-hop queries. However, multi-hop reasoning poses two key challenges: (1)~maintaining coherent reasoning paths, and (2)~avoiding prematurely discarding critical multi-hop connections. To tackle these challenges, we introduce iQUEST, a question-guided KBQA framework that iteratively decomposes complex queries into simpler sub-questions, ensuring a structured and focused reasoning trajectory. Additionally, we integrate a Graph Neural Network (GNN) to look ahead and incorporate 2-hop neighbor information at each reasoning step. This dual approach strengthens the reasoning process, enabling the model to explore viable paths more effectively. Detailed experiments demonstrate the consistent improvement delivered by iQUEST across four benchmark datasets and four LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) offer transformative potential for clinical decision support in spine surgery but pose significant risks through hallucinations, which are factually inconsistent or contextually misaligned outputs that may compromise patient safety. This study introduces a clinician-centered framework to quantify hallucination risks by evaluating diagnostic precision, recommendation quality, reasoning robustness, output coherence, and knowledge alignment. We assessed six leading LLMs across 30 expert-validated spinal cases. DeepSeek-R1 demonstrated superior overall performance (total score: 86.03 $\pm$ 2.08), particularly in high-stakes domains such as trauma and infection. A critical finding reveals that reasoning-enhanced model variants did not uniformly outperform standard counterparts: Claude-3.7-Sonnet's extended thinking mode underperformed relative to its standard version (80.79 $\pm$ 1.83 vs. 81.56 $\pm$ 1.92), indicating extended chain-of-thought reasoning alone is insufficient for clinical reliability. Multidimensional stress-testing exposed model-specific vulnerabilities, with recommendation quality degrading by 7.4% under amplified complexity. This decline contrasted with marginal improvements in rationality (+2.0%), readability (+1.7%) and diagnosis (+4.7%), highlighting a concerning divergence between perceived coherence and actionable guidance. Our findings advocate integrating interpretability mechanisms (e.g., reasoning chain visualization) into clinical workflows and establish a safety-aware validation framework for surgical LLM deployment.

Today's large language models (LLMs) are capable of supporting multilingual scenarios, allowing users to interact with LLMs in their native languages. When LLMs respond to subjective questions posed by users, they are expected to align with the views of specific demographic groups or historical periods, shaped by the language in which the user interacts with the model. Existing studies mainly focus on researching the opinions represented by LLMs among demographic groups in the United States or a few countries, lacking worldwide country samples and studies on human opinions in different historical periods, as well as lacking discussion on using language to steer LLMs. Moreover, they also overlook the potential influence of prompt language on the alignment of LLMs' opinions. In this study, our goal is to fill these gaps. To this end, we create an evaluation framework based on the World Values Survey (WVS) to systematically assess the alignment of LLMs with human opinions across different countries, languages, and historical periods around the world. We find that LLMs appropriately or over-align the opinions with only a few countries while under-aligning the opinions with most countries. Furthermore, changing the language of the prompt to match the language used in the questionnaire can effectively steer LLMs to align with the opinions of the corresponding country more effectively than existing steering methods. At the same time, LLMs are more aligned with the opinions of the contemporary population. To our knowledge, our study is the first comprehensive investigation of the topic of opinion alignment in LLMs across global, language, and temporal dimensions. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/ku-nlp/global-opinion-alignment and https://github.com/nlply/global-opinion-alignment.

One of the long-standing goals in optimisation and constraint programming is to describe a problem in natural language and automatically obtain an executable, efficient model. Large language models appear to bring this vision closer, showing impressive results in automatically generating models for classical benchmarks. However, much of this apparent success may derive from data contamination rather than genuine reasoning: many standard CP problems are likely included in the training data of these models. To examine this hypothesis, we systematically rephrased and perturbed a set of well-known CSPLib problems to preserve their structure while modifying their context and introducing misleading elements. We then compared the models produced by three representative LLMs across original and modified descriptions. Our qualitative analysis shows that while LLMs can produce syntactically valid and semantically plausible models, their performance drops sharply under contextual and linguistic variation, revealing shallow understanding and sensitivity to wording.

Large language models show strong performance on knowledge intensive tasks such as fact-checking and question answering, yet they often struggle with numerical reasoning. We present a systematic evaluation of state-of-the-art models for veracity prediction on numerical claims and evidence pairs using controlled perturbations, including label-flipping probes, to test robustness. Our results indicate that even leading proprietary systems experience accuracy drops of up to 62\% under certain perturbations. No model proves to be robust across all conditions. We further find that increasing context length generally reduces accuracy, but when extended context is enriched with perturbed demonstrations, most models substantially recover. These findings highlight critical limitations in numerical fact-checking and suggest that robustness remains an open challenge for current language models.