Papers with AIME
Plasticity vs. Rigidity: The Impact of Low-Rank Adapters on Reasoning on a Micro-Budget (2026.eacl-srw)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in mathematical reasoning typically rely on massive scale . yet, can strong reasoning capabilities be induced in small language models under extreme constraints? |
| Approach: | They train small language models with a single GPU for under 24 hours . they find that adapters unlock significant plasticity in standard instruction-tuned models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model training on a single GPU (48GB) achieves 40% Pass@1 on AIME 24 (an 11.1% improvement over baseline) the model training results show that the adapter capacity and initialization are critical factors. |
Confidence-Aware Reasoning: Optimizing Self-Guided Thinking Trajectories in Large Reasoning Models (2025.emnlp-industry)
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| Challenge: | Chain-of-thought enables large reasoning models to reason through multi-step problems but often leads to unnecessarily long or redundant reasoning traces, a phenomenon known as overthinking. |
| Approach: | They propose an inference-time framework that selectively prunes low-utility reasoning blocks and halts early when sufficient confidence has been achieved. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves answer accuracy by up to +13.3% while reducing average reasoning length by 40%–50%. |
To Code or not to Code? Adaptive Tool Integration for Math Language Models via Expectation-Maximization (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools that integrate chain-of-thought reasoning and code execution lack metacognitive awareness to integrate tools. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that synergizes structured exploration with off-policy RL optimization to create a cycle between metacognitive tool-use decisions and evolving capabilities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves over 11% on MATH500 and 9.4% on AIME without o1-like CoT. |
DRP: Distilled Reasoning Pruning with Mathematical Skill-aware Step Decomposition for Efficient Large Reasoning Models (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing solutions to this problem are inference-time pruning and tuning-based distillation. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that combines inference-time pruning with tuning-based distillation to enable efficient and accurate reasoning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework reduces token usage while improving accuracy on GSM8K and AIME tokens while avoiding performance drop. |
TemplateRL: Structured Template-Guided Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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Jinyang Wu, Chonghua Liao, Mingkuan Feng, Shuai Zhang, Zhengqi Wen, Haoran Luo, Ling Yang, Huazhe Xu, Jianhua Tao
| Challenge: | Existing RL methods rely on unstructured self-sampling to fit scalar rewards, resulting in inefficient rollouts. |
| Approach: | They propose a structured template-guided RL framework that augments policy optimization with explicit template guidance. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that TemplateRL outperforms GRPO and GRPI by 99% on AIME and 41% on AMC with superior stability on weak models and remarkable cross-domain generalization. |
Mid-Think: Training-Free Intermediate-Budget Reasoning via Token-Level Triggers (2026.findings-acl)
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Van Yang, Shouren Wang, Debargha Ganguly, Xinpeng Li, Chaoda Song, Vikash Singh, Vipin Chaudhary, Xiaotian Han
| Challenge: | Explicit /think> tags are used to expose intermediate reasoning and enable hybrid thinking behaviors. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free prompting format that combines these triggers to achieve intermediate-budget reasoning, outperforming fixed-token and prompt-based baselines in terms of the accuracy–length trade-off. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms fixed-token and prompt-based prompts in accuracy–length trade-offs while improving Qwen3-8B on AIME from 69.8% to 72.4% and on GPQA from 58.5% to 61.1%. |
CoT-Valve: Length-Compressible Chain-of-Thought Tuning (2025.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Wei et al., 2022) have developed a powerful method for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a tuning and inference strategy to control the length of reasoning chains by a parameter space direction to control their length. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces reasoning chains on GSM8K from 741 to 225 tokens with a minor performance drop (95.07% to 94.92%) and on AIME from 6827 to 4629 tokens, with only one additional incorrect answer. |
UTMath: A Benchmark for Math Evaluation with Unit Test (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Prevailing benchmarks for mathematical reasoning include MATH and AIME . predicated on single-instantiation problems with fixed numbers, these models leave generalization on isomorphic problem variants untested. |
| Approach: | They propose a mathematical reasoning benchmark that quantifies solution accuracy and solution space generality. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model solves 1,053 problems spanning 9 mathematical domains . the best-performing model solved only 32.57% of the problems . |
SIFT: Grounding LLM Reasoning in Contexts via Stickers (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Using a new approach, we can improve the pass@1 accuracy of LLM reasoning in large language models. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that leverages increasing inference-time compute to ground LLM reasoning in contexts. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves pass@1 accuracy of DeepSeek-R1 on AIME2024 from 78.33% to **85.67%** and that on Aime2025 from 69.8% to **77.33%**. |
Budget-Aware Anytime Reasoning with LLM-Synthesized Preference Data (2026.findings-acl)
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Xuanming Zhang, Shwan Ashrafi, Aziza Mirsaidova, Amir H. Rezaeian, Miguel Ballesteros, Lydia Chilton, Zhou Yu, Dan Roth
| Challenge: | Recent work has explored reasoning efficiency via test-time scaling and early exit strategies. |
| Approach: | They propose an anytime reasoning framework and the Anytime Index to improve model quality . they also propose an inference-time self-improvement method to produce better intermediate solutions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves on NaturalPlan, AIME, and GPQA datasets and improves reasoning quality and efficiency under budget constraints. |
DELTA: Dynamic Layer-Aware Token Attention for Efficient Long-Context Reasoning (2026.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Large reasoning models generate long chains of intermediate steps, but their inference cost is dominated by decoding, where each new token must attend to the entire growing sequence. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free sparse attention mechanism that reduces inference cost by evicting entries from the key-value cache. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model matches or surpasses full attention on reasoning benchmarks . it reduces the number of attended tokens by up to 4.25 and delivers 1.54 speedup . |
Discovery and Reinforcement of Tool-Integrated Reasoning Chains via Rollout Trees (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to augment Large Language Models (LLMs) with computational capabilities have focused on short Chain-of-thought (CoT) integrating tool-use into long CoT remains underexplored due to the scarcity of training data and the challenge of integrating it without compromising the model’s intrinsic long-chain reasoning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that enables spontaneous tool-use during long CoT reasoning without additional human annotation. |
| Outcome: | Experiments on AIME and GPQA-Diamond show that DART significantly outperforms existing methods, successfully harmonizing tool execution with long CoT reasoning. |
Logic-Thinker: Teaching Large Language Models to Think more Logically. (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Recent Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated the ability to generate long chains of thought (LongCoT) LongCoT still faces challenges such as redundancy and logical incoherence. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural-symbolic reasoning framework that generates chains of thought . they propose Logic-Thinker, which transforms symbolic solvers into chains of thoughts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms models fine-tuned with ThinkerCoT on logic reasoning tasks. |
Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Reward Model - Optimization-Free Verification from Experience (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing verifiers operate on the surface text or on confidence proxies derived from token probabilities, which can be brittle. |
| Approach: | They propose a training-free, non-parametric verifier that summarizes each reasoning trace by an activation delta and compares it to two class centroids computed from labeled experience. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves selection and reranking on large and less-calibrated models. |
Marco-o1 v2: Towards Widening The Distillation Bottleneck for Reasoning Models (2025.acl-long)
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Huifeng Yin, Yu Zhao, Minghao Wu, Xuanfan Ni, Bo Zeng, Huaiyu.wh Huaiyu.wh, Tianqi Shi, Liangying Shao, Chenyang Lyu, Longyue Wang, Weihua Luo, Kaifu Zhang
| Challenge: | Recent efforts to distill large reasoning models into smaller lightweight models have shown competitive performances. |
| Approach: | They propose to distill long Chain-of-Thought data to improve SFT and RL methods by constructing data from scratch using Monte Carlo Tree Search. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method significantly improves reasoning performance on various benchmarks such as math (GSM8K, MATH, AIME). |
Think Clearly: Improving Reasoning via Redundant Token Pruning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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Daewon Choi, Jimin Lee, Jihoon Tack, Woomin Song, Saket Dingliwal, Sai Muralidhar Jayanthi, Bhavana Ganesh, Jinwoo Shin, Aram Galstyan, Sravan Babu Bodapati
| Challenge: | Recent large language models show promising capabilities in long-form reasoning . however, they tend to include substantial redundancy in reasoning paths . |
| Approach: | They propose a structure-aware pruning method that prioritizes removing redundant tokens . they remove redundant token and then resume the reasoning generation . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method shows strong performance on reasoning-intensive benchmarks without training. |
The Evolution of Thought: Tracking LLM Overthinking via Reasoning Dynamics Analysis (2026.acl-long)
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Zihao Wei, Liang Pang, Jiahao Liu, Wenjie Shi, Jingcheng Deng, Shicheng Xu, Zenghao Duan, Jingang Wang, Fei Sun, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
| Challenge: | Explicit reasoning trajectories increase performance but often trigger overthinking . despite its importance, this study examines how each step of reasoning affects the final outcome . |
| Approach: | They propose a Reasoning Completion Point Detector that detects the RCP by monitoring rank dynamics of termination tokens. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces token usage by up to 44% while preserving accuracy. |
CogAtom: From Cognitive Atoms to Olympiad-level Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating high-quality, multi-step reasoning are limited . we present a new framework for synthesising rigorous, cognitively diverse problems . |
| Approach: | They propose a cognitive atom-based framework for synthesizing mathematically rigorous problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing methods in accuracy, reasoning depth and diversity while exceeding the difficulty of AIME. |
Diverse Multi-tool Aggregation with Large Language Models for Enhanced Math Reasoning (2025.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Multi-TAG uses multiple tools to solve complex math problems over multiple reasoning steps. |
| Approach: | They propose a tool-based LLM framework that leverages multiple tools to solve math problems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms baselines that use individual tools with the same number of runs and significantly outperformed standard baselines. |