News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:What objective is reasoning solving? by akavi on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @03:44PM (#50446078)
My understanding of the math is weak (to say the least), but intuitively what I'm getting from this is:

1) Pretraining creates a bias _towards_ "correct answers" with each inference step

2) A longer walk is more likely to land in the correct region, given it's easier to verify you have the correct answer than to create it

3) RL selects the subset of walks that lands in the correct region and tilts the distribution in favor of such walks

4) By 2, that trains towards longer walks

...Is that correct?

Re:What objective is reasoning solving? by jebarker on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @03:50PM (#50446141)
Yes. One point worth making though is that pre-training trains the model to produce high probability completions - in practice, most of what it's trained on is a good completion as a human would judge it, i.e. it's not factually false data, so you get "creates a bias _towards_ "correct answers" with each inference step", but the model isn't really learning what correct or incorrect means in any way a human would consciously think about it.
Re:What objective is reasoning solving? by trinari on Tuesday November 10, 2026 @04:03PM (#50446306)
does that lead to much inside the box thinking by models? Do they try to follow the clearest path?