Thinking About Thinking: Evaluating Reasoning in Post-Trained Language Models
Recent advances in post-training techniques have endowed Large Language Models (LLMs) with enhanced capabilities for tackling complex, logic-intensive tasks through the generation of supplementary planning tokens. This development raises a fundamental question: Are these models aware of what they "learn" and "think"? To address this, we define three core competencies: (1) awareness of learned latent policies, (2) generalization of these policies across domains, and (3) alignment between internal reasoning traces and final outputs. We empirically evaluate these abilities on several tasks, each designed to require learning a distinct policy. Furthermore, we contrast the profiles of models post-trained via Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT), Direct Policy Optimization (DPO), and Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our findings indicate that RL-trained models not only demonstrate greater awareness of their learned behaviors and stronger generalizability to novel, structurally similar tasks than SFT models but also often exhibit weak alignment between their reasoning traces and final outputs, an effect most pronounced in GRPO-trained models.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Distilling Reasoning Ability from Large Language Models with Adaptive Thinking
Chain of thought finetuning (cot-finetuning) aims to endow small language models (SLM) with reasoning ability to improve their performance towards specific tasks by allowing them to imitate the reasoning procedure of lar…
HallucinationNot Too Short, Not Too Long: How LLM Response Length Shapes People's Critical Thinking in Error Detection
Large language models (LLMs) have become common decision-support tools across educational and professional contexts, raising questions about how their outputs shape human critical thinking. Prior work suggests that the a…
S1-Bench: A Simple Benchmark for Evaluating System 1 Thinking Capability of Large Reasoning Models
We introduce S1-Bench, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the performance of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) on simple tasks that favor intuitive system 1 thinking rather than deliberative system 2 reasoning. While LRM…
Natural QuestionsThinking Longer, Not Always Smarter: Evaluating LLM Capabilities in Hierarchical Legal Reasoning
Case-based reasoning is a cornerstone of U.S. legal practice, requiring professionals to argue about a current case by drawing analogies to and distinguishing from past precedents. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have…
Legal ReasoningOptimalThinkingBench: Evaluating Over and Underthinking in LLMs
Thinking LLMs solve complex tasks at the expense of increased compute and overthinking on simpler problems, while non-thinking LLMs are faster and cheaper but underthink on harder reasoning problems. This has led to the …