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LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

arxiv.org

41–50 of 137 posts

Re: LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

#41
post #37
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do... I want a chatbot that can automatically magic up proofs that all my code is correct for instance. I don't care if I understand the proofs. I care if some tool that checks proofs understands them, and that's a mechanical game just like go or chess.

I think that there is a strong limit to that: if you don't understand the proofs, you're going to have a hard time understanding when the model explains to you why your code is not correct.

In most cases I expect saying " assertion fires with input" is enough to be useful. Or "I can't prove assertion doesn't fire, but I don't have a counter example either". Assertion used broadly to include things like rules for avoiding undefined behavior.

Better explanations would be nice of course, but not obviously practical. I wouldn't actually trust the AIs reasoning much in the first place, only that it can't trick the proof checking tool.

Re: LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

#43

Cool result, but worth highlighting two points: - Model is finetuned from Qwen-2.5 Instruct, which includes millions of specially filtered math examples in both pretraining and supervised fine-tuning already. - To generate the perfect 817 math examples for LIMO, they used state of the art models like R1 to filter down from an initial pool of 10 million math problems. In other words, a whole lot of intelligence was us…

Why is everyone is so critical of using information from a previous model to make a more efficient model. There’s nothing wrong with making progress using prior work. And increasing efficiency is progress.

You wouldn’t criticize someone’s kombucha because they didn’t piece their SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) together microbe by microbe.

Re: LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

#44

Cool result, but worth highlighting two points: - Model is finetuned from Qwen-2.5 Instruct, which includes millions of specially filtered math examples in both pretraining and supervised fine-tuning already. - To generate the perfect 817 math examples for LIMO, they used state of the art models like R1 to filter down from an initial pool of 10 million math problems. In other words, a whole lot of intelligence was us…

Why is everyone is so critical of using information from a previous model to make a more efficient model. There’s nothing wrong with making progress using prior work. And increasing efficiency is progress. You wouldn’t criticize someone’s kombucha because they didn’t piece their SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) together microbe by microbe.

[deleted]

Re: LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

#46

Cool result, but worth highlighting two points: - Model is finetuned from Qwen-2.5 Instruct, which includes millions of specially filtered math examples in both pretraining and supervised fine-tuning already. - To generate the perfect 817 math examples for LIMO, they used state of the art models like R1 to filter down from an initial pool of 10 million math problems. In other words, a whole lot of intelligence was us…

Yeah, but it's cheaper. The context right now is that OpenAI, with first-mover advantage, cutting-edge-hardware, and tens of billions of dollars of investment, are not getting benchmark performance better than Chinese-developed models that are trained with cut-down nvidia GPUs and a lot less money.

But... they are? o3-mini is faster than DeepSeek-R1 and has comparable capability. And while I hate "AGI achieved internally" meme, o3 is significantly better than o1. Though I doubt how long until DeepSeek-R3 happens. They could skip R2 too citing Cloudflare R2 :P

Re: LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

#47

Here is how I make sense of it (I have no expertise in this subject, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong): I think when the model is pretrained on the internet, it does gain most of the skills required to do mathematical reasoning, however, since its task is to predict the next word distribution on the entire internet, it does not normally use this ability, since most of the text on the internet is not this…

This suggests fine-tuning a base model (with SL or RL) generally doesn't make the model inherently smarter, only the initial self-supervised learning during pretraining does. Though it would be strange if no amount of reinforcement learning could make the LLM truly smarter.

Re: LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

#48

Cool result, but worth highlighting two points: - Model is finetuned from Qwen-2.5 Instruct, which includes millions of specially filtered math examples in both pretraining and supervised fine-tuning already. - To generate the perfect 817 math examples for LIMO, they used state of the art models like R1 to filter down from an initial pool of 10 million math problems. In other words, a whole lot of intelligence was us…

Why is everyone is so critical of using information from a previous model to make a more efficient model. There’s nothing wrong with making progress using prior work. And increasing efficiency is progress. You wouldn’t criticize someone’s kombucha because they didn’t piece their SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) together microbe by microbe.

You are looking at it from a product perspective. From a scientific perspective, it just means the respective benchmark is meaningless, so we don't know how well such a model generalizes.

Re: LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

#49
If the LIMO hypothesis about the existence of a latent capacity for efficient reasoning in small models that can be elicited by finetuning the model with a small datasets is true, then we could see a huge transference of power from huge models to small models and that in a recurrent way seems to offer unlimited power. But to feed that loop there should be a property of those datasets, they teach the model to adapt reasoning to model size and that is verified by the model extending the depth of the reasoning chain using a small branching factor in the exploration space, like a minimum cover to detect deep patterns.

Re: LIMO: Less Is More for Reasoning

#50
Any idea if the same dataset can be used to improve human reasoning? Let's say I manually analyze 817 math examples, would that be optimal strategy for me to improve my math reasoning? Can the same distilation process be applied to leetcode?
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