[HN Gopher] Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Pers...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Understanding R1-Zero-Like Training: A Critical Perspective
        
       Author : pama
       Score  : 90 points
       Date   : 2025-03-22 14:35 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | scribu wrote:
       | If the base models already have the "reasoning" capability, as
       | they claim, then it's not surprising that they were able to get
       | to SOTA using a relatively negligible amount of compute for RL
       | fine-tuning.
       | 
       | I love this sort of "anti-hype" research. We need more of it.
        
       | mirekrusin wrote:
       | So they achived R1-Zero like performance without those long CoT
       | that sometimes never end/are impacting inference time with
       | fraction of fine tunining resources?
        
         | refulgentis wrote:
         | No, they still have "<think>", but it's shorter by removing
         | part of a term.
        
           | mirekrusin wrote:
           | That's what I mean, those CoT are never ending currently
           | until you run out of context.
        
             | refulgentis wrote:
             | I'm not sure if you're talking conversationally and I'm
             | taking it as a technical query, or you're saying CoT never
             | terminate for you and asking for input, or asking what the
             | paper implies about CoT, or relaying that you understand
             | the papers claim that this method net reduces CoT length.
        
               | mirekrusin wrote:
               | Verbose, non terminating CoT is currently common problem
               | with open weight models based on R1-zero methods.
               | 
               | Currently it seems that this shift of cost to inference-
               | time is a necessary tradeoff that we have to live with
               | (for now at least).
               | 
               | It's more of a problem for many people running those
               | models locally because they have constrained hardware
               | that can't handle those long contexts.
               | 
               | It seems that this paper shows not only that their method
               | is cheaper in terms of fine tuning but also significantly
               | reduces inference time cost for CoTs.
               | 
               | If what they say gets confirmed it looks to me like quite
               | significant contribution?
        
       | drakenot wrote:
       | I've seen the same "Superficial Self-Reflection" mentioned in
       | their linked blog post[0] as well, where the conclusion doesn't
       | naturally follow the output of the thinking tokens. I think
       | people are fooled by this, but if you take the time to inspect
       | the "chain of thought" tokens they often don't match the final
       | output answer.
       | 
       | I don't deny that performance for certain logic tasks goes up
       | with these models but I don't fully understand what role the
       | thinking tokens take in these cases.
       | 
       | [0] https://oatllm.notion.site/oat-zero
        
         | andai wrote:
         | I heard that even just getting the model to print a bunch of
         | whitespace ("think for longer") improves the quality of the
         | final response, because some kind of processing is still
         | happening internally?
        
           | MoonGhost wrote:
           | Could it be that model just uses latent space for thinking
           | while generating almost garbage? Interesting to check if
           | adding repeating something at the end of prompt helps. I.e.
           | model uses it for 'thinking'.
        
       | mentalgear wrote:
       | Overall the industry needs more review, less hype. I was shocked
       | to find out SWE-verified [0] is all but verified.
       | 
       | [0] benchmark used by all major vendors to "showcase" coding
       | ability, turns out to be <10% properly solved:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnOc_kKKuac
        
         | belter wrote:
         | Failure modes are also interesting to show what is happening or
         | not really happening. Like the test of asking GenAI to create
         | clocks at specific times, or people drawing with the left hand.
         | All you get are clocks, at 10 min past two, or people drawing
         | with the right hand, since it's 99% of what is in the training
         | data.
         | 
         | Like Sabine says, if the LLM models, already read all the Math
         | books in the world but are not yet able to do basic math,
         | without calling upon a calculator, how much reasoning is really
         | emerging?
         | 
         | "The Path to AGI is Coming Into View":
         | https://youtu.be/mfbRHhOCgzs?t=219
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-03-22 23:00 UTC)