Reasoning

When a junior developer misunderstands your instructions, they might still write code that compiles and runs—but does the wrong thing. This is exactly what large language models (LLMs) do when faced with faulty premises. The latest paper, Refining Critical Thinking in LLM Code Generation, unveils FPBench, a benchmark that probes an overlooked blind spot: whether AI models can detect flawed assumptions before they generate a single line of code. Spoiler: they usually can’t. ...

If today’s AI models can ace bar exams, explain astrophysics, and generate functional code from a napkin sketch, why do they still fail at seemingly simple questions that require looking and thinking? A new benchmark called MCORE (Multimodal Chain-of-Reasoning Evaluation) answers that question with a resounding: because reasoning across modalities is hard—and we’re not as far along as we thought. Beyond Pattern Matching: What MCORE Tests The majority of multimodal evaluations today rely on either: ...

When training Large Language Models (LLMs) to reason, reinforcement learning has proven to be a powerful yet blunt instrument. Most methods reduce the entire model output to a single pass/fail reward, applying that verdict to every token—regardless of whether it contributed to success or failure. This makes credit assignment vague, verifiability weak, and learning inefficient. Enter CAPO (Credit Assignment Policy Optimization), a method that shifts the paradigm: it brings verifiable, fine-grained credit assignment to the token level, using LLMs themselves as judgment agents. ...

In early 2025, Apple’s now-infamous “thinking-illusion” benchmark delivered a sobering verdict: large reasoning models (LRMs)—those step-by-step thinkers like DeepSeek-R1 and Qwen 3 Thinking—failed to show meaningful advantages over simpler LLMs. Their verbose, reflective outputs didn’t help on easy problems, nor did they scale on hard ones. In some cases, they even underperformed. But what if we were judging thinking models under unfair conditions? A new study titled “Thinking Isn’t an Illusion” argues that the problem isn’t with reasoning itself—it’s with reasoning in a vacuum. When these models are augmented with tools like Python interpreters and structured scratchpads, their performance transforms dramatically. In fact, they begin to consistently outperform their non-reasoning counterparts across a diverse set of logic puzzles. ...

When a large language model (LLM) answers your question with a high degree of confidence, do you trust it? What if it’s wrong—but still confident? The stakes are high in real-world applications, from legal guidance to enterprise decision support. Yet today’s LLMs remain notoriously unreliable in aligning their confidence with correctness. The paper Deliberative Searcher: Improving LLM Reliability via Reinforcement Learning with Constraints (Yin et al., 2025) offers a bold response: rewire LLMs to be reasoning-primary and information-secondary. Instead of front-loading search and passively absorbing evidence, Deliberative Searcher acts more like a prudent investigator: it thinks, self-assesses, retrieves external information only when needed, and calibrates its confidence step-by-step. Crucially, it learns this behavior through a custom constrained reinforcement learning regime. ...

In the race to make Large Language Models (LLMs) reason like humans—or better—most researchers obsess over one thing: prompting. Chain-of-thoughts, few-shot demos, scratchpads, tools. But a new study from NVIDIA suggests something even more fundamental: it’s not just how you prompt them—it’s how long you train them. Their paper, Scaling Up RL: Unlocking Diverse Reasoning in LLMs via Prolonged Training, explores how stretching reinforcement learning (RL) over time unlocks broader, more stable, and more versatile reasoning in LLMs. This isn’t just about incremental gains—it’s about escaping reasoning ruts. ...

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as the favored path to boost large language models’ reasoning abilities. The latest headline-grabbing claim? That even random or incorrect reward signals can help models like Qwen2.5 become better reasoners. But a new paper, “Reasoning or Memorization?”, cuts through the hype—and it does so with scalpel-like precision. It reveals that what we thought were signs of emergent reasoning in Qwen2.5 might, in fact, be a textbook case of data contamination. If true, the implications are serious: much of what we thought we knew about RL-driven reasoning gains could be little more than sophisticated memory retrieval. ...

If GPT-4 was the apex of pretraining, DeepSeek might be the blueprint for what comes next. Released in two families—DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1—this Chinese open-source model series isn’t just catching up to frontier LLMs. It’s reshaping the paradigm entirely. By sidestepping traditional supervised fine-tuning in favor of reinforcement learning (RL), and coupling it with memory-efficient innovations like Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA) and cost-efficient training techniques like FP8 mixed precision and fine-grained MoE, DeepSeek models demonstrate how strategic architectural bets can outpace brute-force scale. ...

In the AI race to make large language models both factual and reasoned, two camps have emerged: one focused on retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to fight hallucination, the other on long-chain reasoning to mimic logic. But neither wins alone. This week’s survey by Li et al. (2025), Towards Agentic RAG with Deep Reasoning, delivers the most comprehensive synthesis yet of the field’s convergence point: synergized RAG–Reasoning. It’s no longer a question of whether retrieval helps generation or reasoning helps retrieval—but how tightly the two can co-evolve, often under the coordination of autonomous agents. ...

When AI agents begin to talk to themselves—really talk to themselves—we might just witness a shift in how machine reasoning is conceived. A new paper, “Introspection of Thought Helps AI Agents”, proposes a reasoning framework (INoT) that takes inspiration not from more advanced outputs or faster APIs, but from an old philosophical skill: inner reflection. Rather than chaining external prompts or simulating collaborative agents outside the model, INoT introduces PromptCode—a code-integrated prompt system that embeds a virtual multi-agent debate directly inside the LLM. The result? A substantial increase in reasoning quality (average +7.95%) and a dramatic reduction in token cost (–58.3%) compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Let’s unpack how this works, and why it could redefine our mental model of what it means for an LLM to “think.” ...