Reasoning
Getting a model to show its work, and checking the work.
- 2026ICML 2026PublishedCurated
Beyond Trajectory-Level Attribution: Graph-Based Credit Assignment for Agentic Reinforcement Learning
Group-based reinforcement learning methods credit whole trajectories by final outcome, which makes it hard to see the contribution of individual steps — including valuable steps buried inside failed trajectories. The authors propose Graph-based Group Policy Optimization (GraphGPO), which aggregates all rollout trajectories into a unified state-transition graph, estimates the distance from each state to the task goal using global information encoded in the graph, and assigns credit to each edge by how much the transition reduces that distance. They report improved training efficiency and state-of-the-art performance across a range of benchmarks.
- 2023NeurIPS 2023PublishedCurated
Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models
Generalises chain-of-thought into a search tree. The model proposes multiple partial solutions, evaluates them against each other, and can back out of a branch that is not working, rather than committing to one linear line of reasoning.
- 2023NeurIPS 2023PublishedCurated
Reflexion: Language Agents with Verbal Reinforcement Learning
Instead of updating weights, the agent writes down what went wrong after a failed attempt and carries that reflection into the next attempt. The reflection is stored in natural language and used as additional context, so no gradient step is required.
- 2022ICLR 2023PublishedCurated
ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models
Interleaves verbal reasoning traces with tool actions, so the model thinks about what to do next, does it, then reasons about what came back. The reasoning trace also becomes an auditable record of why the agent took each step.
- 2022ICLR 2023PublishedCurated
Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models
Samples several independent reasoning paths for the same question and takes the most common answer, instead of trusting a single greedy chain. The intuition is that a correct derivation can be reached many ways while a wrong one is usually reached once.
- 2022NeurIPS 2022PublishedCurated
Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models
Shows that asking a model to write out intermediate reasoning steps before answering substantially improves multi-step arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning, and that the behaviour appears without any fine-tuning at sufficient model scale.