2 papers
cs.LG2026
The Kinetics of Training: A Driven-Nucleation Rate Law for Emergence, Plasticity Loss, and Circuit Control in Language Models
Lei Dong
A capability appears in a language model when the last parts of its circuit align in one stochastic attempt, and getting all but one right is worth nothing. We show this no-partial…
cs.CL2026
Better Starts, Better Ends: Bootstrapped Iterative Self-Reasoning Distillation for Compressed Reasoning
Leichao Dong, Dongxu Zhang, Yiding Sun +4
Large reasoning models often solve problems through long chain-of-thought (CoT) traces, yet much of this computation is spent on redundant derivations, repeated self-verification,…