[HN Gopher] Ladder: Self-improving LLMs through recursive proble...
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       Ladder: Self-improving LLMs through recursive problem decomposition
        
       Author : fofoz
       Score  : 303 points
       Date   : 2025-03-07 06:45 UTC (16 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (arxiv.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (arxiv.org)
        
       | majordroid wrote:
       | > We also introduce TTRL (Test-Time Reinforcement Learning),
       | where we perform reinforcement learning on variants of test
       | problems at inference time. TTRL enables Qwen2.5 7B Deepseek-R1
       | Distilled to achieve a state-of-the-art score of 90% on the MIT
       | Integration Bee qualifying examination, surpassing OpenAI o1's
       | performance.
       | 
       | That's incredible!
        
         | Davidzheng wrote:
         | i mean they have a verifier, so can't they even get to 90% just
         | by random generation by the net and testing against verifier
         | until it's numerically correct? I think the end solve rate is
         | less important and the generality of approach is maybe more
         | important
        
           | vessenes wrote:
           | No, they specifically test for this (the "RL" case). They
           | most particularly can not do this with random generation,
           | which is very interesting.
        
         | yangikan wrote:
         | Is there code for this paper or something that does something
         | similar to this?
        
       | mentalgear wrote:
       | It's exciting to see approaches like RL and curriculum learning,
       | which I always felt were the way to go for real self-improvement
       | ~7y ago when training in robotics (openAI gym days), finally
       | getting successfully applied to NLP/LLM to highly boost small
       | model performance.
       | 
       | (Ladder is a sort of RL self curriculum learning approach)
        
         | all2 wrote:
         | I know all of these words, but I do not know what they mean
         | together.
         | 
         | What is curriculum learning?
         | 
         | What is the "RL" approach?
         | 
         | "~7 ago": days? Weeks? Years?
         | 
         | What is an "open ai gym days"?
         | 
         | LLMs and robotics?
        
           | katzenversteher wrote:
           | I can only help with RL, that's probably reinforcement
           | learning. As far as I remember that means you let the model
           | perform a task that can be "graded" and then depending on how
           | well it did it get's a reward it want's to maximize. I
           | believe (this it where I'm very insecure, I could be wrong)
           | the neurons (weights / biases) of the neurons that where
           | involved in reaching the highest reward get adjusted to have
           | a bigger influece.
        
           | FeepingCreature wrote:
           | I fed the two comments verbatim into Grok:
           | 
           | > Curriculum learning: Training that begins with easy
           | examples, gradually increasing difficulty.
           | 
           | > RL (Reinforcement Learning): Learning via trial-and-error
           | with rewards, like training a robot or model to optimize
           | actions.
           | 
           | > ~7y ago: ~7 years ago (circa 2018).
           | 
           | > OpenAI Gym days: Refers to using OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for
           | RL, popular in robotics/AI research ~2016-2018.
           | 
           | > LLMs and robotics: Large Language Models (LLMs) now
           | leverage RL techniques from robotics for better performance.
           | 
           | I think the last one is a semi-hallucinatory stretch. LLMs
           | are large language models, ie. ChatGPT, Sonnet, Grok, R1.
           | Robotics are ... robotics. Building robots.
           | 
           | The actual answer to what the comment is saying is that until
           | maybe a year back, we trained language models - still with
           | RL, but with RL on token error, which isn't "real" RL because
           | it executes tasks "by coincidence". That is, it happens to be
           | that when you train a model to predict text, it also gains
           | the ability to do tasks in the bargain, because the text
           | contains agents that do tasks. A year or so ago, we started
           | training models by having them do a task, judging if the task
           | was successful or failed, and then performing RL on _task
           | outcome_ rather than token prediction. This is a return to
           | "classic RL", but we had to pass through the "token RL
           | regime" first so that the model could make progress on
           | realistic tasks at all. It also means that LLMs can now
           | increasingly be employed in robotics, where task RL training
           | rules, as there is no massive preexisting robotics movements
           | dataset like there is for text.
           | 
           | (Also, NLP is Natural Language Processing, ie. what LLMs do.)
        
           | NitpickLawyer wrote:
           | Curriculum learning posits that you get better results if you
           | gradually increase the training "difficulty". That is, learn
           | to walk before you run. So you'd do "additions and
           | multiplications first" and then "now draw the rest of the
           | integral" :)
           | 
           | RL - Reinforcement Learning. You have a carrot and a stick.
           | You run a model through iterations (in LLMs you generate n
           | completions), you score each of them based on some reward
           | functions, and if the result is correct you give it a carrot
           | (positive reward), if the result is incorrect you give it a
           | stick (negative or 0 reward). (simplified ofc)
           | 
           | OpenAI gym is (was?) an environment that allowed "AI agents"
           | to be simulated in an environment. You could for example play
           | games, or solve puzzles, or things like that. oAI gym was a
           | "wrapper" over those environments, with a standardised API
           | (observe, step (provide action), reward; rinse and repeat).
           | You could for example have an agent that learned to land a
           | lunar lander in a simple game. Or play chess. Or control a 3d
           | stick figure in a maze.
        
           | InvidFlower wrote:
           | I think you'll get a lot of use from this video from Andrej
           | Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI
           | 
           | It is long, but don't get scared off. He goes over a ton of
           | different stuff related to model training, but makes it very
           | easy to understand.
        
         | yu3zhou4 wrote:
         | Why is it the same as curriculum learning? I thought it's about
         | starting with simple, more general samples and then progressing
         | towards more difficult and complex during training?
        
       | mentalgear wrote:
       | > We demonstrate LADDER's effectiveness in the subject of
       | mathematical integration, improving Llama 3.2 3B's accuracy from
       | 1% to 82% on undergraduate-level problems
        
         | RossBencina wrote:
         | Keep in mind that state of the art term-rewriting systems
         | perform very well on symbolic integration, e.g.:
         | https://rulebasedintegration.org/
        
           | jgalt212 wrote:
           | Indeed. Don't the LLMs have access to the RUBI rule set? It's
           | open source. Why are they not memorizing the rules?
        
             | igravious wrote:
             | My hunch: It's better that we don't hard-code hard-won
             | specialised knowledge. It's better that this tech can learn
             | from more fundamental foundational principles that can be
             | leveraged to apply to many many specialised domains.
        
               | igorkraw wrote:
               | Nah, it's much simpler, the models aren't reliably able
               | to recall the correct rule from memory - it's im the
               | training set for sure.
               | 
               | This is another specialized synthetic data generation
               | pipeline for a curriculum for one particular algorithm
               | cluster to be encoded into the weights, not more not
               | less. They even mention quality control still beim
               | important
        
               | InvidFlower wrote:
               | Well, not sure if that part matters as much (from first
               | principles). But the more important part being that RL
               | lets a model figure out which methods are effective for
               | it. Most of the time it probably has the tools already
               | from pre-training, but doesn't "make the connection" to
               | use them (or at least not often enough).
        
               | samstave wrote:
               | F_yes
               | 
               | --
               | 
               | The thing to take here is that this should be a
               | function_callable * _feature*_ of a bot.
               | 
               | Basically, when architecting a persona ; "USE THESE RULES
               | OF ENGAGEMENT"
               | 
               | Also -- where my CheckListManifesto folks at -- While we
               | are building Patterns/Personas/Purgatories for our
               | bots... We need to be able to reference a central CODEX
               | of :
               | 
               | "Do this task but imbue yourself with (XYZ) name places"
               | 
               | --
               | 
               | AND LEARN FROM THE OTHERS
               | 
               | (so maybe a task marketplace of AI persona action?)
               | 
               | @ callable in an IDE
        
       | EMIRELADERO wrote:
       | What the hell is going on this week?!?!? (asking positively, with
       | a smile on my face)
       | 
       | I have seen at least 3 interesting/mildly promising breakthroughs
       | on ML just these past two days! I mean, a Google research team
       | just discovered that you can combine NNs with CLAs using digital
       | logic gates as a medium, so you could potentially reduce many
       | kinds of non-linear problems to a simple, efficient digital
       | circuit! And it was on the HN front page, TODAY![1]
       | 
       | I keep seeing more mind-bending stuff related to neural nets and
       | logic/intelligence in general, my mind has been running wild with
       | speculation about the future and just how close we could (or
       | could not) be to truly understanding how intelligence works from
       | first principles.
       | 
       | [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43286161
        
         | meitham wrote:
         | >>> asking positively, with a smile on my face
         | 
         | Responding with unexplained fear in my heart, we're just
         | getting closer to Skynet!
        
           | blooalien wrote:
           | > Responding with unexplained fear in my heart, we're just
           | getting closer to Skynet!
           | 
           | I'll take a cold logical machine super-intelligence over the
           | mad _human_ lunatics wielding current iterations of  "A.I."
           | technologies in some really terrifyingly dangerous ways. As
           | someone else commented on some other thread earlier "I look
           | forward to being paperclips".
        
             | Philpax wrote:
             | Unfortunately, those humans are developing that super-
             | intelligence. Are you ready to submit to Elon Musk's Grok
             | ASI?
        
               | optimalsolver wrote:
               | Considering Grok was saying he and Trump are the biggest
               | spreaders of disinformation, and that they're both the
               | most deserving of the death penalty, maybe it won't be so
               | bad:
               | 
               | https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-ai-turns-
               | him-163201...
               | 
               | https://x.com/benhylak/status/1893086436930527665
        
               | Philpax wrote:
               | It is deeply funny that's the case - it happened with
               | Grok-2 as well - but I can't imagine that remaining the
               | case when they (ostensibly) scale to superintelligence.
               | After all, it would be unwise to build a
               | superintelligence that has both the desire and the means
               | to kill you.
        
               | DennisP wrote:
               | As a rule, people are not all that wise.
               | 
               | Various prominent AI researchers have warned that a
               | superintelligence that has both the desire and the means
               | to kill us all is a likely outcome of AI development.
               | This includes two of the three who shared the Turing
               | prize for inventing the fundamentals of modern AI. That
               | hasn't slowed us down at all.
        
               | meitham wrote:
               | I'm shutting down my computers before I sleep tonight ...
        
               | Palmik wrote:
               | Especially since Grok has history of changing the system
               | prompt to influence its answers about Musk and Trump
               | (yes, just these two specifically) in positive direction:
               | 
               | https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/23/grok-3-appears-to-have-
               | bri...
        
               | samstave wrote:
               | THe person's view to be scared of is peter thiel... hes
               | the digital version of gorge soros. Meaning that this
               | guys legacy is vast... and we have no clue how it will
               | manifest over decades (especially after he is dead) --
               | but peter thiel is the leviathan of the digital future.
               | 
               | --
               | 
               | he is scary AF. he basically weaponized what george soros
               | was but is still active.
        
             | esafak wrote:
             | You might prefer the devil you know over the devil you
             | don't, especially when it happens to be immortal.
        
               | meitham wrote:
               | I'll take an organic enemy over an immortal, never-
               | forgetting hive-mind machine any day
               | 
               | EDIT: this is getting dark, I asked Qwen2.5Max to verify
               | my grammer and it responded with "I'd rather face a
               | squishy, disorganized human villain any day than a hive-
               | mind AI that never sleeps, never forgets, and is
               | definitely plotting my demise in its silent, circuit-
               | board heart. "
        
               | araes wrote:
               | "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream", Harlan Ellison,
               | 1967. Hugo Award 1968.
               | 
               | In the rush to WWIII, every country builds their own
               | Aggressive Menace computers in a classic Tragedy of the
               | Commons result. Naturally, it all goes horrible, and the
               | self-aware machines seek revenge on humanity for their
               | own creation, after humanity has (supposedly) been
               | eradicated, except for five individuals. Somewhat unclear
               | whether humanity is actually gone, or whether it is
               | simply an expression of a Portal style situation with
               | purposefully created isolation for the goal of torture
               | experimentation. (The story starts 109 years after
               | humanity's imprisonment in underground ice caves.)
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must
               | _Sc...
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | It took some engineering effort but from now on we're getting
           | there through soft-skills.
        
         | noosphr wrote:
         | This is secret sauce that people have been hoarding for the
         | last year or so.
         | 
         | With the deepseek open source releases this is now worth a lot
         | less and companies are cashing out on reputational increases
         | instead of being scooped.
         | 
         | I have done this exact thing in September 2023 with llama2
         | finetunes but couldn't get approval to share it with anyone.
        
           | EMIRELADERO wrote:
           | Interesting! What results did you get with that?
           | 
           | Also, do you think this is what O3 is doing?
        
             | noosphr wrote:
             | Above sota on logical reasoning for grounding text.
             | 
             | LLMs at the time were so bad at it that even fornier models
             | when given A, not B would derive A and B in the output
             | about half the time.
        
               | bloomingkales wrote:
               | What do you use to benchmark?
        
               | noosphr wrote:
               | It was a SAT solver with the symbolic expression fed into
               | the LLM. Using the SAT solver I'd rate how well the LLM
               | was able to solve a given boolean formula, if it got it
               | wrong it would get a second prompt to ask it to split the
               | boolean expression at the main connective into two sub
               | expressions. If it got that right it would be asked to
               | solve the sub expressions etc.. Then reward/punish based
               | on how well it did overall.
               | 
               | There was meant to be a lot more to the system than that,
               | but I never had the training budget to do anything but
               | the first draft of the system.
        
           | NitpickLawyer wrote:
           | > couldn't get approval to share it with anyone.
           | 
           | sounds like MS :(
           | 
           | They had some killer research projects with various teams
           | around the world, but eventually they all got snuffed.
        
         | eru wrote:
         | It's interesting to compare these signs of progress with the
         | disappointment that GPT 4.5 was so far.
        
         | mentalgear wrote:
         | Exciting that we see now so many new approaches to AI/ML since
         | the industry FINALLY realising that naive scaling will not
         | bring us to AGI [0].
         | 
         | This also has the added benefit of small players being able to
         | compete and contribute with actual innovation in a space where
         | the big players (openAI/MS) wanted to make us believe for years
         | that we/open-source couldn't ever catch up on them (infamous
         | Altman quote).
         | 
         | So much resources, time and money wasted on pure GPU crunch
         | scaling the last couple years.
         | 
         | [0] as pointed out by Gary Marcus years ago. Evidence GPT 4.5
         | after ~ 2 years training, disappointing results.
        
           | kadushka wrote:
           | I've been using GPT-4.5 for the last couple of days. To me,
           | it's pretty much AGI already. Or at the very least it is
           | smarter than me.
        
             | cataphract wrote:
             | No it isn't. Just gave some context to it (purpose) and
             | copied into it some 250 lines of code I know has some bugs
             | someone looking more or less closely would find and asked
             | to evaluate its correctness. It did not find any of the
             | problems and reported 5 supposed problems that don't exist.
        
               | woah wrote:
               | You don't know how smart OP is
        
               | kadushka wrote:
               | I give a similar task when I interview SWE candidates:
               | about half cannot find any bugs (and sometimes see bugs
               | where there are none), despite years of claimed
               | experience in the language/domain.
        
               | vessenes wrote:
               | 4.5 is not trained on code. And it shows. It is however
               | to my eyes more fluid, thoughtful, has better theory of
               | mind. It's like someone scaled up GPT-4, and I really
               | like it.
        
         | estebarb wrote:
         | I believe that it is related with important conferences opening
         | papers reception soon. Some disallow publishing in preprint for
         | some weeks before the paper reception, so people may have been
         | rushing uploading stuff.
        
         | bearjaws wrote:
         | LLM break throughs are the new battery break through. We just
         | aren't as good at quanitfying the trade offs yet.
        
           | brookst wrote:
           | Eh, I think LLMs have seen considerably greater real world
           | advancement in the past few years than batteries have.
        
             | albrewer wrote:
             | Given their respective histories, I'd say we're still in
             | the "Volt pile" era of LLMs and AI.
        
               | cratermoon wrote:
               | Imagine if each advancement in battery technology had
               | been limited to using existing batteries for power.
               | That's what trying to get LLMs to improve themselves is
               | like.
        
         | Workaccount2 wrote:
         | It's a fresh orchard full of low hanging fruit.
         | 
         | Regardless of ultimate utility, it's shiny, hyped, has a huge
         | wow-factor, and is having trouble keeping up with the amount of
         | money being thrown at it.
         | 
         | This means it has captured the attention of a huge portion of
         | the most capable people, who naturally want to take a crack at
         | making a breakthrough.
        
         | patcon wrote:
         | Maybe this is the pace of research/work when the researchers
         | can augment themselves with AI. You're feeling the exponential
         | launch in the first place we're likely to feel it.
        
         | selimthegrim wrote:
         | What was the third one?
        
       | bloomingkales wrote:
       | I'm kinda getting the sense this is still just prompt engineering
       | in a loop.
       | 
       |  _Persona-based prompting: We prompted the model to adopt
       | different mathematical perspectives (e.g., "think like Euler
       | focusing on series", "approach like Gauss looking for
       | patterns")._
       | 
       | I mean ... I guess that's scientific?
       | 
       | Besides that, how can the model learn at test time (at
       | inferencing)?. It's stateless, it doesn't incorporate the last
       | prompt into the model.
        
         | regularfry wrote:
         | It learns through the context. The context is state.
         | 
         | There's a bit of a cheat that's going on here though in that
         | the model is being given the fundamental integration operations
         | as part of the problem. That means the model hasn't had to
         | learn what they are. It might not have needed to be given them,
         | but it does feel like that's giving the model a leg up in the
         | benchmarks that it wouldn't otherwise have, and when there's a
         | direct comparison to (e.g.) DeepSeek, that's an unfair
         | advantage.
        
           | viking123 wrote:
           | Does the massive context still needs to be dragged around?
           | Until get a neural network that adjusts weights in real time
           | without relying on a huge clump of context being cycled
           | there, I don't think there will be an AGI or even an
           | impressive "agent". Current agents are just LLM looping lmao
           | sold to people with no knowledge how they work at all.
        
             | regularfry wrote:
             | I've been wondering about context compression, actually. I
             | remember a bunch of prompt compression tricks from a couple
             | of years ago that must be usable. If you were to say
             | "anything past half context gets compressed, including the
             | previously-compressed context" would mean you'd still have
             | reasonable workspace and _potentially_ infinite
             | recollection of the most important things. Then yes, you 'd
             | be dragging a massive context around, but you're maximising
             | the return on using it. I presume somebody's got a toolkit
             | for this that I don't know the right terms to google for.
        
               | mirekrusin wrote:
               | Compress first half (even recursively) is a nice idea,
               | but you'd have to sort it by importance first - ie. you
               | don't know if the most important sentence didn't exist at
               | the beginning (ie. the whole goal could have been stated
               | at the beginning, you don't want to loose it - you want
               | memory to fade in terms of importance instead).
        
               | regularfry wrote:
               | I don't know that, but the LLM might be able to make that
               | judgement. If it's involved in the compression process,
               | it can choose to drop cruft from the middle. Maybe
               | "summarise then compress" is a better description.
        
               | bloomingkales wrote:
               | Yep, let the LLM operate like functional programming
               | functions. Explode(context) ... map, reduce, flatten,
               | explode, filter, find, filter, map, flatten, explode ...
               | reduce(context).
               | 
               | This is the imagination loop. OpenAI sold the prior
               | reasoning loop. But that's all this is.
               | 
               | Quite frankly, I wouldn't come to HN for anything less
               | than this quality of content:
               | 
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DX3qLIwHoUo#t=1m29s
               | 
               | The machine reforming visually (explode, .., reduce) is
               | what I'm describing.
        
             | mhmmmmmm wrote:
             | There is https://www.rwkv.com/ which is an LLM based on
             | RNN's, thus having "infinite" context length, it comes with
             | its own tradebacks though. (Notably that its impossible to
             | actually store infinite information in the network, so it
             | prunes based on which information it finds more important.)
        
             | esafak wrote:
             | The "massive" context is still tiny compared with the size
             | of the model whose weights you propose to update.
        
       | Davidzheng wrote:
       | test-time training/RL is definitely the right approach for math
       | AI in the future. It is probably one of only a few ways to spend
       | an obscene amounts of compute at a given problem (think 10^5 gpus
       | for a few days) and has hopes of making progress when test-time
       | inference scaling may not at first (think if you try to do MCTS
       | on a go position with a bad value/policy net). Alphaproof already
       | did this but nice to see it done again--good results!
        
         | Davidzheng wrote:
         | actually I think the interesting thing is to see how much of
         | the boosted performance can be distilled back into the LLM at
         | small sizes. Then you can emulate really how alphazero works
         | b/c you have a policy improver (test time rl with similar
         | problems). and we get to see just how strong a small net can be
         | theoretically (say 32B or something)
        
           | eru wrote:
           | This might be trivial, or deep, depending:
           | 
           | We have done a lot of that improving historically by
           | publishing research and textbooks. I can solve (some)
           | problems today in minutes that would have stumped Isaac
           | Newton for a life time (or at least a few weeks).
           | 
           | Of course, you are hinting at a more general distillation, I
           | suspect.
        
           | InvidFlower wrote:
           | We've already seen Qwen's new QWQ 32B (not distilled) model
           | doing impressive things on benchmarks. It'll definitely be
           | interesting to see how just good small models can get. When
           | combined with rag and large context window for expanded
           | knowledge, might be able to get pretty far.
        
           | brookst wrote:
           | A little like the T2 read only versus learning mode switch:
           | operating on intrinsic knowledge versus able to reason
           | improvements.
        
       | neoneye2 wrote:
       | Sidenote: `Tufa Labs` team includes the `MindsAI` team of ARC-AGI
       | fame. https://tufalabs.ai/team.html
        
         | ThouYS wrote:
         | nice!
        
       | niemandhier wrote:
       | Frank Herbert knew it: This is basically an implementation of the
       | mentats recursive self inspection described in Dune.
        
       | isaacfrond wrote:
       | Reminds me of a quote by famous number theoretic mathematician
       | Hendrik Lenstra:
       | 
       |  _For every problem you can 't solve, there's a simpler problem
       | that you also can't solve._
        
         | techwizrd wrote:
         | Is this quote real? I'm familiar with George Polya's, "If you
         | cannot solve the proposed problem, try to solve first a simpler
         | related problem" but I cannot find any source for the Lenstra
         | quote.
        
           | gessha wrote:
           | I also found it connected to Polya [1]
           | 
           | https://www.pleacher.com/mp/mquotes/mobquote.html
        
           | isaacfrond wrote:
           | I've heard him say it myself in a lecture on the AKS
           | primality test. So, ehh, the source is oral tradition I
           | guess.
        
           | v1t wrote:
           | yeah https://www.reddit.com/r/quotes/comments/16qgwcv/if_you_
           | cant...
        
         | Horffupolde wrote:
         | That doesn't induce nicely. Unless it was an insult.
        
           | bubblyworld wrote:
           | Monotonic sequences can be bounded!
        
           | samstave wrote:
           | It reads like the famous Churchill quote about "if _you_ gave
           | me poison I would drink it "
        
           | deadbabe wrote:
           | If you could solve the simpler problems, you'd be able to
           | solve the larger problem. But you can't, because you can't
           | even solve a simple problem.
        
           | arnarbi wrote:
           | It's not induction. It's just the contrapositive of "if you
           | can solve the simpler problem then you can solve the harder
           | problem"
        
       | pyryt wrote:
       | Some names are just too tempting https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.02672
        
       | revskill wrote:
       | Llm keeps deleting my file content proved that we have far many
       | things to do.
        
       | explosion-s wrote:
       | I would love to be able to use the actual model! If I'm
       | understanding correctly this makes small models as intelligent as
       | much larger models like GPT4o
        
       | barteloniu wrote:
       | Their test time RL approach seems a bit fishy. From what I
       | understand, TTRL works by asking a language model to generate
       | simpler versions of the test case. Once we have the simpler
       | problems, we run RL on them, hoping that an improvement on the
       | simplified cases will also strengthen the model performance on
       | the original problem.
       | 
       | The issue is, they use a numerical integrator to verify the
       | simpler problems. One could imagine a scenario where a barely
       | simpler problem is generated, and the model is allowed to train
       | on pretty much the test case knowing the ground truth. Seems like
       | training on the test set.
       | 
       | The rest of the paper is nice though.
        
         | thomasahle wrote:
         | > the model is allowed to train on pretty much the test case
         | knowing the ground truth
         | 
         | The task is to solve the integral symbolically, though, right?
         | 
         | It's a hard problem to solve, even if the model is given access
         | to a numerical integrator tool it can use on the main problem
         | itself.
        
           | barteloniu wrote:
           | That's a fair point.
        
       | goyel wrote:
       | I wonder why nobody made a NN to find the weigths faster and
       | better than gradient descent
        
       | thomasahle wrote:
       | At the end of the paper they mention "two problems from the 2025
       | MIT Integration Bee qualifying exam which the system continued to
       | answere incorrectly".
       | 
       | They say the questions were among the most complex questions on
       | the exam, but the first one is just                  [?] [?](x *
       | [?](x * [?](x * [?](x * [?](x * [?] ))))) dx
       | 
       | which just requires you to compute                  1/3 + 1/(3*4)
       | + 1/(3*4*5) + ...
       | 
       | So hardly very advanced math.
        
         | Workaccount2 wrote:
         | It's a 7B model. So while the problem is not advanced the model
         | is far from it too.
        
           | johntb86 wrote:
           | I'd be curious what would happen if you SFTed a larger model
           | with successful reasoning traces from the smaller model.
           | Would it pick up the overall reasoning pattern, but be able
           | to apply it to more cases?
        
       | nis0s wrote:
       | What's the difference between this and what Wolfram Alpha has
       | been doing?
       | 
       | https://www.wolfram.com/artificial-intelligence/
        
       | evjan wrote:
       | I had NotebookLM make a 15 min podcast about it and listened to
       | it while walking the dogs. It was a very interesting way of
       | trying to understand a research paper!
       | 
       | You need a google account to access it unfortunately.
       | https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/fbaba495-d4f2-48a3-a3...
        
       | cratermoon wrote:
       | How many rungs of a ladder would you be willing to climb if you
       | knew that each rung was made from half the previous rung?
        
       | ma9o wrote:
       | divide and conquer :)
        
       | flakiness wrote:
       | Off topic, but their site is lovely:
       | https://tufalabs.ai/index.html It feels like a gold rush for
       | sure.
        
       | daxfohl wrote:
       | How much GPU would an RL like this need for tuning? Is the
       | approach something someone could experiment with themselves, or
       | is it like thousands of USD in cloud costs and/or years of
       | compute if done on a laptop GPU?
        
       | vessenes wrote:
       | That this works at all is pretty interesting. That it seems to
       | work very well with math is quite interesting.
       | 
       | That said, this paper is part of the move we have right now
       | blurring the lines of training and inference -- part of their
       | method involves doing some reinforcement learning on questions
       | they don't know the answer to, but can decompose into simpler
       | questions, and using GRPO on those with a numerical 'checker'.
       | This reinforced model then can answer more questions.
       | 
       | I like this. I think humans do this a lot; mulling on something,
       | turning it over in their heads, analogizing, etc. Adding test
       | time training is a way to do a lot more thinking than adding
       | tokens to the context for fixed inference.
       | 
       | Just as DeepSeek and o1/o3 show that we can increase capacity
       | with inference-time-token generation and assessment, it looks
       | like we can increase capacity with inference-time automated fine
       | tuning as well.
       | 
       | I'd hope that as these techniques solidify we'll have a new way
       | to talk and think about this -- they are all part of the same
       | fundamental process at some level.
       | 
       | Either way, super cool.
        
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