Papers by Guirong Xue
The Emperor’s New Reasoning: Format Imitation Overshadows Genuine Mathematical Understanding in SFT (2025.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have yielded impressive gains on mathematical reasoning benchmarks via supervised fine-tuning (SFT). |
| Approach: | They investigate the mechanisms behind SFT improvements in small-scale large language models by examining four key questions: (1) Are performance gains primarily due to format alignment rather than reasoning? (2) Can high-quality supervision encourage genuine reasoning? (4) Are format alignment gains consistent across model sizes and architectures? |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform the proprietary models on OlympiadBench and Omni-Math, but lack the brittleness of the models under perturbations to test their reasoning abilities. |