Committee

Artificial intelligence has undergone a significant transition from basic language models to advanced models that focus on reasoning tasks. These newer systems, known as Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), represent a class of tools designed to simulate human-like thinking by producing intermediate reasoning steps before arriving at conclusions. The focus has moved from generating accurate outputs to understanding the process that leads to these answers. This shift has raised questions about how these models manage tasks with layered complexity and whether they truly possess reasoning abilities or are simply leveraging training patterns to guess outcomes. Redefining Evaluation: Moving Beyond Final Answer Accuracy A recurring problem with evaluating machine reasoning is that traditional benchmarks mostly assess the final answer without examining the steps involved in arriving at it. Final answer accuracy alone does not reveal the quality of internal reasoning, and many benchmarks are contaminated with data that may have been seen during training. This creates a misleading picture of a model’s true capabilities. To explore actual reasoning, researchers require environments where problem difficulty can be precisely controlled and intermediate steps can be analyzed. Without such settings, it is hard to determine whether these models can generalize solutions or merely memorize patterns. To evaluate reasoning more reliably, the research team at Apple designed a setup using four puzzle environments: Tower of Hanoi, River Crossing, Checkers Jumping, and Blocks World. These puzzles allow precise manipulation of complexity by changing elements such as the number of disks, checkers, or agents involved. Each task requires different reasoning abilities, such as constraint satisfaction and sequential planning. Importantly, these environments are free from typical data contamination, enabling thorough checks of both outcomes and the reasoning steps in between. This method ensures a detailed investigation of how models behave across varied task demands. The research introduced a comparative study using two sets of models: Claude 3.7 Sonnet and DeepSeek-R1, along with their “thinking” variants and their standard LLM counterparts. These models were tested across the puzzles under identical token budgets to measure both accuracy and reasoning efficiency. This helped reveal performance shifts across low, medium, and high-complexity tasks. One of the most revealing observations was the formation of three performance zones. In simple tasks, non-thinking models outperformed reasoning variants. For medium complexity, reasoning models gained an edge, while both types collapsed completely as complexity peaked. Comparative Insights: Thinking vs. Non-Thinking Models Under Stress An in-depth analysis revealed that reasoning effort increased with task difficulty up to a certain point but then declined despite the availability of resources. For instance, in the Tower of Hanoi, Claude 3.7 Sonnet (thinking) maintained high accuracy until complexity reached a certain threshold, after which performance dropped to zero. Even when these models were supplied with explicit solution algorithms, they failed to execute steps beyond specific complexity levels. In one case, Claude 3.7 could manage around 100 steps correctly for the Tower of Hanoi but was unable to complete simpler River Crossing tasks requiring only 11 moves when $N = 3$. This inconsistency exposed serious limitations in symbolic manipulation and exact computation. The performance breakdown also highlighted how LRMs handle their internal thought process. Models frequently engaged in “overthinking,” generating correct intermediate solutions early in the process but continuing to explore incorrect paths. This led to inefficient use of tokens. At medium complexity levels, models began to find correct answers later in their reasoning chains. However, at high levels of complexity, they failed to produce accurate solutions. Quantitative analysis confirmed that solution accuracy dropped to near zero as the problem complexity increased, and the number of reasoning tokens allocated began to decline unexpectedly. Scaling Limits and the Collapse of Reasoning This research presents a sobering assessment of how current Learning Resource Management Systems (LRMs) operate. Research from Apple makes it clear that, despite some progress, today’s reasoning models are still far from achieving generalized reasoning. The work identifies how performance scales, where it collapses, and why over-reliance on benchmark accuracy fails to capture deeper reasoning behavior. Controlled puzzle environments have proven to be a powerful tool for uncovering hidden weaknesses in these systems and emphasizing the need for more robust designs in the future. Check out the Paper. All credit for this research goes to the researchers of this project. Also, feel free to follow us on Twitter and don’t forget to join our 99k+ ML SubReddit and Subscribe to our Newsletter. The post Apple Researchers Reveal Structural Failures in Large Reasoning Models Using Puzzle-Based Evaluation appeared first on MarkTechPost.

arXiv:2506.10617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper addresses the persistent challenge of accurately digitizing paper-based electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings, with a particular focus on robustly handling single leads compromised by signal overlaps-a common yet under-addressed issue in existing methodologies. We propose a two-stage pipeline designed to overcome this limitation. The first stage employs a U-Net based segmentation network, trained on a dataset enriched with overlapping signals and fortified with custom data augmentations, to accurately isolate the primary ECG trace. The subsequent stage converts this refined binary mask into a time-series signal using established digitization techniques, enhanced by an adaptive grid detection module for improved versatility across different ECG formats and scales. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach. The U-Net architecture achieves an IoU of 0.87 for the fine-grained segmentation task. Crucially, our proposed digitization method yields superior performance compared to a well-established baseline technique across both non-overlapping and challenging overlapping ECG samples. For non-overlapping signals, our method achieved a Mean Squared Error (MSE) of 0.0010 and a Pearson Correlation Coefficient (rho) of 0.9644, compared to 0.0015 and 0.9366, respectively, for the baseline. On samples with signal overlap, our method achieved an MSE of 0.0029 and a rho of 0.9641, significantly improving upon the baseline’s 0.0178 and 0.8676. This work demonstrates an effective strategy to significantly enhance digitization accuracy, especially in the presence of signal overlaps, thereby laying a strong foundation for the reliable conversion of analog ECG records into analyzable digital data for contemporary research and clinical applications. The implementation is publicly available at this GitHub repository: https://github.com/masoudrahimi39/ECG-code.

arXiv:2506.10737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The rapid evolution of scientific fields introduces challenges in organizing and retrieving scientific literature. While expert-curated taxonomies have traditionally addressed this need, the process is time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, recent automatic taxonomy construction methods either (1) over-rely on a specific corpus, sacrificing generalizability, or (2) depend heavily on the general knowledge of large language models (LLMs) contained within their pre-training datasets, often overlooking the dynamic nature of evolving scientific domains. Additionally, these approaches fail to account for the multi-faceted nature of scientific literature, where a single research paper may contribute to multiple dimensions (e.g., methodology, new tasks, evaluation metrics, benchmarks). To address these gaps, we propose TaxoAdapt, a framework that dynamically adapts an LLM-generated taxonomy to a given corpus across multiple dimensions. TaxoAdapt performs iterative hierarchical classification, expanding both the taxonomy width and depth based on corpus’ topical distribution. We demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance across a diverse set of computer science conferences over the years to showcase its ability to structure and capture the evolution of scientific fields. As a multidimensional method, TaxoAdapt generates taxonomies that are 26.51% more granularity-preserving and 50.41% more coherent than the most competitive baselines judged by LLMs.

arXiv:2506.10314v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Malicious sockpuppet detection on Wikipedia is critical to preserving access to reliable information on the internet and preventing the spread of disinformation. Prior machine learning approaches rely on stylistic and meta-data features, but do not prioritise adaptability to author-specific behaviours. As a result, they struggle to effectively model the behaviour of specific sockpuppet-groups, especially when text data is limited. To address this, we propose the application of meta-learning, a machine learning technique designed to improve performance in data-scarce settings by training models across multiple tasks. Meta-learning optimises a model for rapid adaptation to the writing style of a new sockpuppet-group. Our results show that meta-learning significantly enhances the precision of predictions compared to pre-trained models, marking an advancement in combating sockpuppetry on open editing platforms. We release a new dataset of sockpuppet investigations to foster future research in both sockpuppetry and meta-learning fields.

arXiv:2506.10406v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, yet they still struggle to reliably verify the correctness of their own outputs. Existing solutions to this verification challenge often depend on separate verifier models or require multi-stage self-correction training pipelines, which limit scalability. In this paper, we propose Policy as Generative Verifier (PAG), a simple and effective framework that empowers LLMs to self-correct by alternating between policy and verifier roles within a unified multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL) paradigm. Distinct from prior approaches that always generate a second attempt regardless of model confidence, PAG introduces a selective revision mechanism: the model revises its answer only when its own generative verification step detects an error. This verify-then-revise workflow not only alleviates model collapse but also jointly enhances both reasoning and verification abilities. Extensive experiments across diverse reasoning benchmarks highlight PAG’s dual advancements: as a policy, it enhances direct generation and self-correction accuracy; as a verifier, its self-verification outperforms self-consistency.

arXiv:2506.10751v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated question answering (QA) over electronic health records (EHRs) can bridge critical information gaps for clinicians and patients, yet it demands both precise evidence retrieval and faithful answer generation under limited supervision. In this work, we present Neural, the runner-up in the BioNLP 2025 ArchEHR-QA shared task on evidence-grounded clinical QA. Our proposed method decouples the task into (1) sentence-level evidence identification and (2) answer synthesis with explicit citations. For each stage, we automatically explore the prompt space with DSPy’s MIPROv2 optimizer, jointly tuning instructions and few-shot demonstrations on the development set. A self-consistency voting scheme further improves evidence recall without sacrificing precision. On the hidden test set, our method attains an overall score of 51.5, placing second stage while outperforming standard zero-shot and few-shot prompting by over 20 and 10 points, respectively. These results indicate that data-driven prompt optimization is a cost-effective alternative to model fine-tuning for high-stakes clinical QA, advancing the reliability of AI assistants in healthcare.

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